Back to Education Materials

About the Project, taken from www.speaktruth.org

The Speak Truth to Power Educational and Advocacy Packet, developed in association with Amnesty International, is now available, free of charge. The packet, which will be distributed to over 10,000 schools in the U.S. beginning in January, 2001, introduces the principles of human rights to high school and university-aged young adults and teaches them how to apply these principles to their own lives and situations they encounter. The 64-page educational packet presents a definition of human rights terms, a brief history of human rights, as well as an introduction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Also included are eight profiles of some of the human rights defenders featured in the hardcover book, resources and guides for further investigation, discussion questions and exercises for classroom use, and stories of other young people who have become active in human rights, and Ariel Dorfman's new work, Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark, complete with staging instructions. This packet is a great way for educators to introduce the basics of human rights to young adults.
If you would like a copy of the education packet, please email Karen Robinson at Amnesty International (krobinso@aiusa.org) or call her at (212) 633-4200.

Defender, Kailash Satyarthi, gives us his thoughts on the educational packet:

It has become obvious that even the allegedly most-advanced educational systems of the world are failing to meet the intrinsic human needs of the individual and of society as a whole. These needs have become obscured behind a cynical essentialism--an "us" versus "them" mentality that pervades and factionalizes children even before they are equipped to think critically about the facts of the world for themselves. If children are brought up first and foremost to evaluate the world through a filter of "isms," even before coming to recognize and celebrate the commonalities and potentials of the human race, then we are, in fact, handing our future over to cynicism and pessimism.

I am speaking of the necessity to include Human Rights Education in the classrooms of today. The problems that confront each and everyone of us, and each and everyone of our children, are unfathomably complex. To evaluate the inummerable shortcomings and crises of the world only through an endless and often-contradictory essentialist array of filters, however, can only
end in defeat.

So how can we guide our children to act on the issues that confront them daily and can seem insurmountable? It is my belief that one of the most useful tools that we can give to our children today is a critical framework based on universal principles of Human Rights...specifically, on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is a document that is both flexible enough to allow for the variety of human lives and human experiences that exist across the globe, yet strong enough, and just enough to provide for us all the parameters of what is and is not acceptable in our behavior towards one another. It is both a simple guard against a lacadasical and boorish relativism and a trustworthy standard of respect for human life in its many permutations. How can we give our children this tool and teach them to use it wisely?

I am pleased to say that the educational packet that is one more part of the Speak Truth to Power project is one tool that can be used to introduce the most basic principles of human rights to high school and university age children and young adults, and teach them to apply them to their own lives and situations they encounter. Developed in close collaboration with Amnesty International, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, and Ariel Dorfman, this 60-page educational packet includes a definition of what we mean when we talk about "human rights," a brief history on the idea
and international legislation of human rights, as well as an introduction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. Furthermore, 8 of the interviews from the book, Speak Truth to Power have been excerpted here, using the individual stories of people, like myself, who have found a calling in Speaking and Acting out against Human Rights abuses, as a lens through which to examine specific human rights issues. Also included are resources and guides for further investigation, discussion questions and excercises for classroom use in learning to apply the Human Rights framework to real-life situations. Equally important, there are stories of other young people today who have dared to stand up and begun to make a difference in their communities and beyond. And finally, the entire script of Ariel Dorfman's play: Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark is included, complete with staging instructions that will allow schools and other organizations to put on this moving theatrical adaptation of the voices heard throughout the hardcover book. The inital 15,000 copies, in English, will be distributed free of charge to English-language high schools and univeristies by Amnesty International. The education packet will be available on-line, and can be downloaded free of charge by anyone who chooses. It is the goal of the STTP project that the packet will be translated into 5 more languages in the year to come.

Ariel Dorfman's Preface

VOICES FROM BEYOND THE DARK

It has not been easy for these voices to reach us.

First, they had to overcome fear. There is always fear at the beginning of every voyage, fear and its malignant twin, violence, at the beginning of every voyage into courage.

The bodies that housed these voices either suffered that violence personally or they witnessed that violence being visited upon another human being, a group, a nation. Some saw a father or a son or a wife abducted in the night and taken away. Others saw children made into warriors and forced to kill at an early age. Still others saw students being beaten, a woman being mutilated, communities silenced and massacred, workers being shot because they demanded a decent wage. Each one of them saw something intolerable: a man killed because of the color of his skin or the color of his opinions, people taken into airless chambers and executed in cold blood, soldiers turn their guns against the people, women hated because of their sexual choices. They saw ancestral lands being stolen from their owners, forests devastated, languages forbidden. They saw books censored, friends subjected to torture, youngsters made into slaves. They saw lawyers jailed and exiled because they defended the victims.

And then something happened. Something extraordinary and almost miraculous. They found a way of speaking out, the men and women whose voices have now reached us decided that they could not live with themselves if they did nothing, they could not stain their lives by remaining silent. They understood that if they witnessed this suffering inflicted on themselves or on others, and did nothing, they were, in some twisted way, being turned into accomplices.

And as they spoke out, they discovered that the fear slowly disappeared. Not the violence. The violence increased when they spoke out and they often suffered in their own bodies, for the first time or again, what had already been perpetrated on others. But when they spoke out and found others on the road with them, other voices, from near and far, they began to find ways of controlling that fear instead of letting the fear control them.

And then came difficulties that were even harder to face. Not the boot of the soldier and the lies of the governments, but the fog of indifference. They had to face the long nights when it seemed nobody cared, when the darkness of apathy seemed to surround them, when their voices did not seem to receive the echo and answer that they needed. They had to face a demon from inside their minds and a demon that blared also from the outside world, both demons in unison repeating the same message: that it was useless, that they should shut their eyes and close their ears and make believe these crimes against humanity and against freedom were not happening.

But they persisted - again, the mystery of how they did it, how they found the strength and the humor and the stubbornness to continue,they persisted because if they had lapsed back into stillness it would have been as if they had died, it would have been better for them not to have been born.

And at times they were successful, those voices, and at other times they failed, but they always knew that the biggest victory was their mere existence, the fact that they had not been silent, that people around
them and in other lands could not say they did not know what was happening. That in times when human beings were doing the most terrible things to one another, others proclaimed, one by one by one, that our species was something else, should be something else, could be something else.

Knowing this, knowing this: that the world could be changed, that the world did not have to be the way it is.

And their voices endured and reached out and one of the persons who listened, who came to listen and record and remember, was Kerry Kennedy-Cuomo. So that those voices would go farther than their lands and their communities, so those voices could inspire others even more, so those voices could persevere one next to the other in a book and in other forms and beyond.

And then Kerry sent those words she had gathered to me.

It was not easy for those voices to reach me.

I had been preparing all my life for the chance to become a bridge for them. Ever since I was a child and was moved, early on, by the injustices I saw around me and then as an adolescent as I realized that those outrages existed in far more grievous forms beyond my immediate horizon and then as a young man when it was my turn to see a dictatorship take over my country, Chile, and watch my friends persecuted and murdered while I was spared, when it became my turn to go into exile and wander the globe and everywhere remark the same inequities mirrored in land after land, when it became my turn to try and figure out how I could write stories and find the words that explored the vast heart of human suffering and the vaster complexity and enigmas of evil, ever since then I had been waiting for the occasion to put my art yet one more time at the service of those who had kept me warm in the midst of my own struggles.

And I have been fortunate enough to have received those voices like you receive a blessing in the dark and to have given them a dramatic form, the search for a space from which those voices may speak yet again, over and over again, as long as there are people, old and young, teachers and students, audiences and actors, who are willing to hearken and understand and keep them company. It was a chance to be the fleeting collaborator of their often fleeting and always splendid lives, a chance to help them live on. It took me my whole life to find a voice of my own to accompany these voices.

So you see: it has not been easy for these voices to reach you.

And yet, now they are yours.

Nurse them, knowing how far they have traveled, what they have been through in order to come this far. Stage them, discuss them, study their issues and implications, find out why they rebelled, what still remains to be done.

Take the voices home with you, carry them into the world.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER OF THE "MAN"

In this play, the character of the Man needs some explanation. He is somewhat of a mythical incarnation, an Evangelist of multiple evils, who reminds us by his words and presence what the defenders are up against. The start of the play establishes him as dangerous, in the sense of physical damage he can inflict, a lurking presence in the State and society that is ready to spring into action, but as the voices themselves show that they cannot be stopped by this sort of intimidation (jail, torture, exile), the Man becomes the embodiment of something more perverse and pervasive and closer to home, to those who stage this play and to those who watch it: the forces of indifference and apathy who are the worst enemies of the struggle for a better world. And he couches his attack upon them less with threats than with mockery and derision, the fact that if the world does not care, why should they be sacrificing their lives? In that sense, he becomes, in a strange way, a projection of the inner fears of the human rights activists themselves, the doubts they may allow to creep into their souls as they take their stand. They have the courage to face death. The question is, do they have the stamina (and the solidarity among them) to face unconcern, the lip service to human rights which is so prevalent among the powerful (people and nations) and which does not deliver when it comes down to the wire, when we need acts rather than words. Do they have the courage to face the death in the human soul that numbs us to the suffering of others? The play does not give an easy answer to that dilemma, but stages the conflict itself, returning the question to the audience, precisely through the Man.

Back to Education Materials