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Abstract

The study presented here shows how eleven-year-old children learn about their rights. Drawing theoretically on the Didaktik tradition, the purpose of the paper is to examine and identify the motives and content in teacher planned human rights education. The analyses show that the main purpose for teaching about rights is social and ethical: Children should learn to respect others, become good fellow humans and not discriminate. The educational content is dominated by four content themes: rights, democracy, discrimination, and protection. The choice of website and societal situation determines how the content is expressed and which rights are emphasised. In particular, violations of rights and children’s protection are stressed. Finally the Convention on the Rights of the Child is emphasised rather than the Declaration of Human Rights, and concepts like human rights, children’s rights and children’s human rights are used equally. The main conclusion is that rights and democratic values are mixed and rights are used without precision. Rights are cognitively weak but strong ethically and socially and mostly used as tools for discussions and social actions.