DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

The question of how citizenship education and human rights education are connected, how they relate to each other and how they relate to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) comes up again and again.

Living-democracy.com highlights this issue in its background material. But we also want to take it up again here: civic education deals with the shaping of human coexistence, the solving of social problems and the making of collectively binding decisions. It addresses questions of power and law, as well as the causes and effects of political action. The primary goal of political education is to impart skills and abilities as well as an individual’s readiness for political action. This involves acquiring competences that are indispensable for active participation in life in a democracy and civic engagement as well as an orientation towards the common good. The basis is the conviction that it is about demanding and defending human rights!

Consequently, it is a matter of promoting the following competences:

• Factual competence:
  Understanding terms and concepts of the political sphere, having them at one’s disposal and being able to develop them critically (e.g. democracy, human rights, common good).
• Judgement competence:|
  Being able to assess and justify political decisions, problems and controversies independently and as far as possible in a fact and/or value-oriented way.
• Action competence:
  Being able to take up and understand the interests and political positions of others, to articulate one’s own positions and to participate in the solution of problems, taking into account one’s own needs and those of others.
• Methodological competence:
  Critically analysing media content and being able to articulate oneself politically (e.g. by means of/in the media) orally, in writing and visually.

Relation to SDGs.

Civic education, human rights education and the SDGs are all about empowering people to participate actively and self-determinedly in shaping our lives together. Both have the common commitment to democracy and human rights as the basis of a good life for all (orientation towards the common good). Compared to civic education, SDGs emphasise the global dimension and the future dimension.

Both civic education and ESD require an examination of conflicting goals in the area of tension between the economy, society and the environment and require conscious reflection on values as the basis for personal (political and civil society) action.

Matching link to materials on the Living Democracy website:
https://www.living-democracy.com/textbooks/volume-1/part-3/