Past Prize-Winning Programs
The Minister for Foreign Affairs Prize
(The best program in the Secondary Education Category)
THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN: Freed From School

Entered by Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF:Germany)
Category: Primary Education
Duration: 12 min. 09 sec.
The UN Children's Rights Convention, which in itself is rather too abstract for children to understand, is featured in this series. This episode describes Article 28.

Since "school is boring, especially arithmetic classes" for Micky and Franky, they skip school and meet Mahmoud who works in his grandparents' market stall. They are impressed with their new friend's natural gift for calculating, but to their surprise, he can not read or write. Later they find he is not allowed to go to school because he is an illegal resident in Germany. A superhero-type character, "Captain Dork", arrives on the scene and, with the help of Micky and Franky, gets Mahmoud enrolled in school.

"The program explains the rights of children through the eyes of children". It is important for adults to understand the child's viewpoints in order to solve such problems were comments from jury members.