Preface

The National Council for Teacher Education has been working in the area of Human Rights and National Values since 1995. It had initiated a project on orientation of teacher educators on Human Rights and National Values. Human Rights as well as orientation towards National Values, e.g. Democracy, Egalitarianism etc. are all important for a teacher education programme since the teacher is the best carrier of such messages to the schools from where those would be carried forward to the future. However, in the existing curriculum of teacher education, there is very little space devoted to such matters. In order to provide some basic information and some skills in incorporating such contents in the classrooms, a set of self-instructional modular units were developed after a series of meetings and discussions with some experts and senior educators. Authors, editors and reviewers for such units were drawn from the NCERT, IGNOU, Jamia Millia Islamia, NOS, and Delhi University. The first set of five modular units on general introduction to Human Rights, Human Rights education in the Elementary, Secondary levels respectively, the mechanism for implementation and the Rights of the Girl Child was published in English (1995) and in Hindi (1996). It was circulated widely to different experts for comments and also to different institutions, in India and abroad. They were also used extensively in the Orientation Courses for Key Resource Persons organised by the NCTE and its Regional Offices of the Southern and Eastern Regions. The responses received were appreciative and quite encouraging for us. There has been a continuous stream of demands for the modules from all over the country. The second volume comprising 4 units published in 1997 in English covers rights of the child, democracy, egalitarianism and secularism. A Hindi version of the same is about to be published. To make it more handy and useful, it has been decided to publish the nine units together in a book form.

I am particularly happy to place this book in the hands of the teacher educators at a time when the whole world is celebrating the golden jubilee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I am sure that the teacher educators would find it useful.

Apart from the module, the NCTE has also published a monograph entitled Human Rights and Indian Values written by Justice Rama Jois, former Chief Justice of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana. This monograph has also been published in Hindi. Both the English and Hindi versions have been very popular. The NCTE has also produced 3 video programmes on the theme of Human Rights education, under the series of video programmes for teacher educators entitled Acharya Samvad. These include two short episodes on Human Rights for the Elementary and Secondary levels of school education and a panel discussion on Human Rights and the teacher. The video material are for distribution to various institutions of teacher education.

We have a plan for publishing other Indian Language versions of the module.

I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Prof. C.H.K. Misra, Consultant, NCTE who has co-ordinated the production of the modules and the video material, and of the authors, reviewers and editors drawn from different universities and academic bodies, who have worked for developing the modules despite other commitments.

We shall welcome all helpful comments and suggestions from professional persons for the improvement of the module.

New Delhi
November 5, 1999

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