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The Summer Institute is an affiliated Teacher CoSer of Erie One BOCES, Jane Ogilvie, Division Director and Bob Carlson, Operations Manager, (716) 821-7550


MISSION STATEMENT:

The Summer Institute for Human Rights and Genocide Studies will provide high school students with a learning experience focused on the historical legacy of human rights policy and episodes of genocide during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Institute will carefully examine the historical context contributing to genocide and the American response to genocide throughout the past one hundred years. By providing students with a pointed curriculum which begins with the Holocaust and stretches to the current situation in Darfur, the Institute offers students a focused look at the continuing story of genocide in our world and tries to provide the hope and knowledge necessary to respond intelligently and to one day make a difference.

GOALS:

  1. Provide high school students a focused examination of genocide starting with the Holocaust and concluding with an investigation of our world today.
  2. Give high school students the opportunity to develop the knowledge and understanding necessary to actively involve themselves with issues of human rights.
  3. Inspire each student to reach out to make the world a better place.

Additionally, the following quotes are at the heart of our
educational message:

  • The best international relations start when people care about the other person, when they try to figure out how the other person thinks and what makes the other person's life go forward. - George W. Bush

  • The highest result of education is tolerance. - Helen Keller

  • The time has come to look anew at our institutions... We must do much more to confront hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth?We must encourage our citizens to engage the world, to understand different cultures, and to welcome others into their homes. - Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice

  • Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. Therefore, people have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred. - Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Revolt

  • When is the best time to plant an oak tree? A hundred years ago; but the second best time is today. - Chinese Proverb, taken from Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

  • If you propose a solution, it does not happen the next day. But it affects the climate of opinion, and things go from being inconceivable to being inevitable. - Larry Summers, ex-president of Harvard, as quoted in Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

  • How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. - Anne Frank

  • I only did what needed to be done. - Irena Sendler

  • You are the messengers to a time we shall not see. - Gerda Weissman Klein

  • The ocean is made of drops. - Mother Theresa

  • Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. - Teddy Roosevelt