Canadians Launch Drive in Public Schools to Teach Human Rights, Fight Prejudice

TORONTO —  Public school systems across Canada have launched a major drive to include the teaching of human rights as a regular part of classroom instruction.

In the southern Ontario steel town of Hamilton, for example, one such lesson examines ethnic and racial jokes and slurs. In Toronto, an anti-apartheid play is touring the schools. A variety of other classroom exercises, films and readings is being tested at schools in six of Canada’s 10 provinces in a broad effort to inculcate respect for individual and community rights and to foster abhorrence of prejudice and authoritarianism.

Strongly backed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government, which is helping to fund many of the projects, the initiatives come as waves of immigrants and refugees from Asia, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean are changing the complexion of Canada and causing quietly spoken resentment among some old-timers here.

The new classes also incorporate material relating to the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights but adopted only five years ago. The Montreal-based Canadian Human Rights Foundation has taken the lead in the campaign for classroom instruction on human rights.

Teachers, Parents Involved

“It is very important to imbue these principles and these rights in young people before prejudices are formed and hardened,” said Stanley Urman, the executive direction of the private, nonprofit foundation. “We should have them experience a violation of freedom of expression so that they will be motivated to protect their rights.”

School officials said that teachers and parents are being involved in the development of course materials and that the only doubt some express is whether such instruction is needed.

“I think everybody’s for good race relations, at least in our area of the woods,” said Steve Barrs, who is supervising the Hamilton School Board’s experimental programs and bears the title of values education consultant. “Perhaps in the States there are some communities that are against it. Here everybody’s for it. Some just don’t see the problem.”

Discrimination Claimed

The new immigrants to Canada have complained in surveys that discrimination still exists in a country that until the 1950s and 1960s barred most nonwhites.

Blacks complain that their children are channeled into vocational programs. Chinese believe there are quotas at some medical schools to restrict their numbers. The recent influx of Tamils and Turks who seek refugee status has caused a mild public outcry. The federal immigration minister said flatly that he did not believe there would have been such a response if they had been white.

But Canadians are deeply reluctant to turn away refugees claiming persecution in their native land once they arrive here, and hardly any are deported.

Mulroney is emphasizing human rights as he attempts to carve out an area of Canadian foreign policy that is not a carbon copy of U.S. policy.