Abstract
The 1948 Human Rights Declaration and the 1989 Children’s Rights Convention often formulate rights conceived of at an earlier stage. The right to education with its essential egalitarian assumptions, e.g., is part and parcel of modern educational theory, which appeared on the European scene as early as the seventeenth century. For educationalists, the wording of the twentieth century declarations and conventions occasionally raises doubts. The very article 28 on the right to education itself is a case in point: it breathes the atmosphere of a ‘Third World’/‘North-South-divide’/‘Global Issues’ discourse, rather than educational discourse. More generally, a lot of the current reflection on the theme of ‘education and human rights’ seems to originate from and feed on such global-political discourse. From the perspective of educational thought, it is crucial to strike the balance between the rights of parents and the rights of children. This duly complicates human rights discourse. The paper focuses on the rights of future adults as compared to the rights of the adults of the present. A characteristic tension surfaces whenever education is implicated in the ideals and future projects of the present adult generation, because, educationally speaking, the future should be left open, being the responsibility of the future adults themselves.
Originally published as The Relation Between the Human Right to Education and Human Rights Education, in: M. L. Pirner, J. Lähnemann, H. Bielefeldt (Hrsg.) Menschenrechte und inter-religiöse Bildung, EB-Verlag Dr. Brandt e.K., Berlin 2015.
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Notes
- 1.
Which was probably to be expected from a document on children’s rights, the more so after the decade, since 1968, of ‘critical educational theory’ (kritische Pädagogik) with its neo-Marxist inspiration, which had been drawing critical attention to the ongoing, more or less hidden, educational reproduction of social-economic inequality. Cf. Meijer (1996).
- 2.
Besides human rights education, CRC 29.1e also seems to imply a form of environmental education, which is an addition as compared to article 26 of the UDHR. Human rights education and environmental education imply the same potentially problematical tension. I discuss it here for human rights education. Elsewhere, I have discussed it for the case of environmental education (Meijer, 2001). Yet another tension inheres in both the UDHR and the CRC articles at issue here, a very educationally relevant one at that, viz., the relation between the rights of parents and the rights of children. Article 26.3 of the UDHR (cited above) is on the parent’s right to choose the kind of education for their children. (It is rather strange, to my opinion, to find it, in a somewhat different form, included in CRC article 29.1c among the things that children have to learn to respect.) There exists a lively educational debate on the relation between children’s rights and parental rights. Meira Levinson—to take just one, thought-provoking example that is quite relevant in the present context because she advocates a liberal education aiming at personal autonomy—draws attention to the quite realistic possibility of ‘parental tyranny’: ‘From children’s perspective […] parents have the potential to be at least as tyrannical as the state – and thus to pervert the course of their education and inhibit their development of autonomy’ (Levinson, 1999, p. 69; cf. Meijer, 2013, pp. 42/43).
- 3.
Arendt has been quite an inspiration to philosophers of education recently, especially the so-called postmodernists among them. Biesta, for example, uses the same passage of Arendt cited here as a motto in his book of 2006 (as such it occurs even twice, viz., on pages xi and 147). In a recent book (Meijer, 2013), I have argued that the educational insights of Arendt are classical-modern, rather than postmodern, and that they are directly comparable to what we may find in, e.g., Theodor Litt’s famous classic of 1927, Führen oder Wachsenlassen (Leading or Letting Grow). Both are essentially about the educational tension (‘Antinomie’) between child and culture and the educational art to keep the right balance between the two. When understood in terms of time (human time, historical time: past/present/future), this balance is the passing on of tradition (from the past, in the present) while keeping the future open (no ‘anticipation of the future’/‘Vorwegnahme der Zukunft’, as Litt puts it: 1967, pp. 19ff).
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Meijer, W.A.J. (2016). The Relation Between the Human Right to Education and Human Rights Education. In: Pirner, M., Lähnemann, J., Bielefeldt, H. (eds) Human Rights and Religion in Educational Contexts. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39351-3_11
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