Explore ideas around access to voting by learning about India’s general election and the country’s commitment to ensuring that all voters are close to a polling station.
Explore ideas around access to voting by learning about India’s general election and the country’s commitment to ensuring that all voters are close to a polling station.
Use the UDHR as a framework to help students understand the progress that has been made since the document's adoption and the areas where we continue to fall short in protecting and promoting human rights today.
According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, in the twentieth century more people have died from genocide and mass murder than from all wars. After each atrocity, men and women in the international community cry “Never again,” but human rights abuses against innocent children, women, and men continue. In his job as a reporter for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof has been able to see these human rights abuses firsthand, winning a Pulitzer Prize for bringing attention to the genocide in Darfur. Yet despite the attention Kristof and others have drawn to this humanitarian disaster, the violence continues. Why is this the case?
Looking to history can help us address this question. In the 1940s, Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish resistance, publicized reports about Nazi atrocities to a mostly unbelieving audience. After the war, he spoke of his attempts to alert people to the mass murder of European Jews, explaining, “The tragedy was that these testimonies were not believed. Not because of ill will, but simply because the facts were beyond human imagination.”2During the Holocaust, many people did not intervene to stop the genocide because they were not able to “imagine the unimaginable.” As Professor Larry Langer argues, “Even with the evidence before our eyes, we hesitate to accept the worst.”
Read an editorial by New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.
Read excerpts from a research paper by Dr. Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon professor who performs research in human psychology and decision-making.
Read and listen to interview excerpts from WNYC's Brooke Gladstone and Nicholas Kristof.
Explore past and present instances of genocide and encourage students to raise their voices about the devastating impact of such atrocities on individuals, communities, and countries.
Use recent photographs to help students connect to the experiences of migrants and to better understand the scale of global migration.
Provide students with context for understanding China’s ongoing persecution of the Uighur Muslims and encourage them to consider the experiences of this religious minority group targeted with discriminatory policies and incarceration.
Students reflect on the role of freedom of the press by exploring the recent story of two journalists arrested in Myanmar while investigating the killings of Rohingya civilians.
The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state, and they often play important roles in politics and conflicts in the Middle East. This Teaching Idea helps students answer questions like “Who are the Kurds and why are they divided among so many countries in the Middle East?”