I just came across this news article in Turkish:
http://www.aksam.com.tr/2010/10/06/haber/guncel/16393/bu_ders__oteki_ni_ogretecek.html

It is about a new subject they will be teaching to year 8 students. It will be called ´citizenship and democracy´ and it will be compulsory!!!
They will be given some incident happened in the past and the students will be asked to assume the roles of the victims or the villains and try to understand what and how they would feel if it was them..
Referring to "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", they will go through subjects like freedom, equality,brotherhood, justice, love, respect, understanding, friendship. They will learn the differences in a society is natural..
They will learn about discriminations of race, religion, language, region, sex, social, classes..They will talk about importance of individual efforts as well as having the laws to stop these type of  discriminations..
They will talk about individuals rights and security, their freedom of expressing themselves etc..
And one of the source they will use is the reports of the Bilge village massacre

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Well this is a fantastic news!!
I always knew that, in the future, new generation will learn those values and wont be very fond of the old generation!!  I am sure they will ask strange questions to their parents ..!!

Hm... I don´t know about this one...

I think every student needs to get society-lessons, as we call them in The Netherlands. They include some of the things you mentioned, like the foundations of democracy, what human rights are, things like this. However, important in these lessons is to form your own opinion, and not get a one sides view in things. The part about villians and victims was interesting, but it would be better to just call it "party A" and "party B". But in all this, it is important to keep in mind that students need to form their own opinions. You should fail a class because your opinion is different from those of the teacher.

Like for example, huma rights. The Human right´s charters of the UN say that men and women are equal, but anybody who is a strict Muslim (using Muslim here, because we are talking about a Muslim-dominated population) will say that they are not equal. Yes, the Quran says so, I´ve checked So, will a strict Muslim student fail this class, if he doesn´t agree with the Human Rights Decleration?

In Poland we also have similar classes, called Knowledge about Society, where you learn the basic theory behind politics, economy and societies. I suppose the classes are a good idea, but that depends on the curriculum. When my parents were in school, they had casses called Being Brought Up in a Socialist Family (or something like that) - they also learnt about different political systems but, as you may guess, only one was right

Barba - you will get in trouble by commenting on equality of men and women in Islam! And I´m too bored and too pregnant to go there again, even though I knwo I won´t be able to add my two cents about my hobby horse