Human Rights-Human Wrongs: Making Political Science Real Through Service-Learning

Abstract

The perennial problem for the scholar and educator is how to combine scholarly interests with classroom material. Academics have often been castigated for living in the “ivory tower,” for being uninterested in the real world, and for being unable to connect with their students. One would think that this would be less so in a dynamic discipline like political science, but like other academics, many political scientists get caught up in covering theories without making those theories real for their students.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Eleanor Roosevelt (United Nations Remarks, 1953)