Buddhist Educational Issues of Human Rights

ABSTRACT

The concept of human rights is said to be deeply rooted in the Western philosophy. In Western history, the development of the natural rights thinking established the modern basis for human rights of today. It is also known that the United Nations led the global efforts related to modern international human rights law. This distinction of human rights concept is useful in understanding specific contexts for the rights of human, which, in turn, would help understand and analyze the usage of anthropocentrism. There are discussions of human rights and rights of nature can be solved simultaneously by an ecological anthropocentrism. An ecological anthropocentrism tries to come true the ideas of security and realization of human Rights, on the other side acknowledge the importance of environmental preservation. But human rights concept of western history has a exclusive rights for human-itself. The aim of this paper is to show that there is a need for the human rights concept as a view of Buddhist education that based on life rights concept. In Buddhism, human has the same kinds of rights with the all creatures. There is no exclusive rights only for human in Buddhism. Violation of the student human rights in school has the problem at the same level of anthropocentric discrimination. So called progressives assert that we should protect our students’ rights from being suppressed due to the expansion of the rights. On the other hand, so called conservatives argue that there should be restrictions on some of the student human rights since they are still in the maturing stage. But there is unarguable thoughts that students has their own rights as a human being as well as all creatures.