An assessment of components of human rights education in high school curricula in Iran

The present study has been carried out on one of the most fundamental issues in the field of political pedagogy and curriculum as human rights education programs within schools. The main objective of this study consists of two issues that include, identifying concepts and components of human rights as well as assessment of the amount of attention that has been paid to the concepts and components of human rights in the curriculum and educational system of high schools in Iran. In this study, regarding components of human rights education, three basic areas of knowledge, skills and attitudes in human rights education have been considered and the amount of attention to these components in the three areas of design, implementation and evaluation of curriculum have been reviewed. The questions of the research have been structured to examine teachers, students and expert's opinions. The research method is descriptive – analytical. The result collected by researcher - administered questionnaire based on Cronbach's alpha is %88. The study population includes 420 humanities teachers of high schools in the city of Kashan from 2009 – 2010. A total of 200 humanities teachers have been selected through using stratified random sampling and a number of 27 educators with simple random sampling as subjects of study have been selected through using sample size table and Cochran's formula. Also by using census sampling [2], a total of 15 curriculum experts of high school working in the Office of Planning and Compiling of Organization for Educational Research and Planning answered the questionnaire.
To analyze the data at the level of descriptive statistics (frequency distribution tables, graphs, averages, etc.) and T & F in inferential statistics (ANOVA analysis test) was used.
The results showed that there is agreement between students, teachers and curriculum experts regarding teaching the discussed concepts of human rights in areas of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Curriculum experts have evaluated the amount of attention to human rights concepts and components in the areas of curriculum designing relatively low. There is no significant difference among the opinions of students, teachers and experts regarding peace education.