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Looks like the Jordanian National Centre for Human Rights (NCHR) are on high gear. After the recent report they issued on Jordan’s prisoners in jail without trial, today’s come a new report on “Inaccurate rights terminology in national school textbooks.”

Here are some excerpts:

Jordanian authorities should revise national school textbooks in order to avoid erroneous human rights terminology from being taught, a researcher from the quasi-governmental National Centre for Human Rights (NCHR) said.

In an ongoing study commissioned by the NCHR, the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, researcher Suleiman Sweiss found several instances of inaccurate information related to human rights in textbooks.

One example was found in a secondary-school course book in which writers define the term “oriental democracy” as “the rule by a small group of educated people who know very well how to run the state.”

“I checked this term and was unable to find it in any scientific resource,” said Sweiss during a roundtable discussion on human rights education in Jordan, held earlier this month in Amman.

Another example of misleading definitions was found in an Islamic secondary-school textbook published last year. The book stated that “the husband has the right to beat his wife softly in a manner that would not leave any traces on her body.”

Aha… so this is where this and this shit starts!

I already feel sorry for the generations and generations who have learned all this. Wondering how the girls did swallowed it. I’m sure the boys in that age would not have given it a second thought. After all, this is what the community around him is practicing.

After having reviewed some 40 course books, Sweiss came to the conclusion that most textbook writers “are incompetent and not well-informed on human rights issues.”

Trying to be polite, he is. I called them cave-dwellers among many other names!

Well, they are not from the same school of thought (although maybe they are), but they feed and carry the same believes.

Overall, however, the researcher considers recent steps by the education ministry to disseminate human rights information in school curriculum a positive sign.

“I’ve noticed an increase in references to democracy, citizenship, women’s and children’s rights and human rights declarations [in textbooks],” said Sweiss.

“The problem is with the implementation of these concepts,” he added.

NCHR’s report on the status of human rights education in Jordan is part of the United Nations World Programme on Human Rights Education.

Officials from the education ministry would not comment on the researcher’s findings.

Well done, NCHR and education ministry. This is a brave move, and I’m sure it was not easy to take such a decision to make the research in the first place.

Hopefully, we will see changes soon. And hopefully, we can teach our kids how they can practice their “Human Rights”, beside teaching them what are their right!!

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