Just a Stick of Juicy Fruit©

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In my seventh and eighth grade humanities classes this fall, students are learning about the founding of the United Nations, and with that, the notion of human rights.  Since September 11, 2001, my teaching on this issue has been informed by the need to reassure students that the world is still making positive progress with respect to our essential freedoms and that there is no need for despair. 

The best way I have found to accomplish this goal is to use an old fashioned histogram of world history.  We use the Wall Chart of World History (1988) by Edward Hull.  The Chart presents human history from biblical times to the present in graphic form, representing branches of human cultures and governments in linear form.  It is an exceptional tool for allowing students to explore how timelines work.   

Our particular focus in the study of human rights is to examine when in the timeline we first see the emergence of a modern notion of human rights.  If the chart stretches along the length of our classroom, we consider that human history actually began a couple of blocks from our school, with the emergence of our species in Africa.

Next, using meter sticks as markers across the histogram, students indicate where on the chart they will find the Roman Empire, the Magna Carta, the American Revolution, and the first three major suffrage movements in US history: universal white male suffrage, African American male suffrage, and women’s suffrage.  Next, we look at the end of World War II and consider the timing of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the length of time from that 1948 document to the present.  In terms of the timeline, the latter works out to the length of a stick of gum, Juicy Fruit in this case, as the different bands on the Chart look like end-to-end pieces of gum. 

So if students are feeling blue about the world, I just remind them to look how much progress we have made.  It wasn’t until 1941 when Franklin Roosevelt said, “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms.” (emphasis added)  A world where these freedoms are guaranteed had not yet arrived, and today we are still working at recognition of universal human rights, but look at what we have accomplished in the figurative length of a stick of gum.