October 6- The NHRCK hosted a workshop to make human rights-friendly textbooks with teachers, students, educational experts, civil organization authorities and publishers as well as textbook authors.
The NHRCK appointed 50 students from secondary education and 34 teachers as the first “Monitoring Group” on June 13. They have been monitoring textbooks that are currently in use for the past four months.
The Monitoring Group has been either recommending or criticizing the illustrations, contents and descriptions as measured against human rights standards. Among these, they distinguished five broad categories: 1. Cases that may foster gender and/or racial stereotypes; 2. Cases that lack consideration for the underprivileged and minorities; 3. Cases that lack impartiality with respect to controversial topics; 4. Cases that lack international and/or human rights considerations; and 5. Cases that devalue youth culture.
The workshop provided a forum to set guidelines for authoring human rights-friendly textbooks with relevant authorities by assessing the current textbooks based on the five categorizations.
