Human rights education and religious education: from mutual suspicion to elective affinity

What are the prospects for joining religious education and human rights education? (1) Human rights educators may cite good historical and philosophical reasons for teaching about human rights without making any reference whatsoever to a religious foundation. (2) For their part, many religious communities have resisted opportunities to form alliances with human rights organisations, citing one form or another of ‘incommensurability’ between their faith and rights. (3) However, there also appear to be some occasions and some projects in which these two communities of discourse can embrace each other, and work for similar goals. How can we come to a better understanding about these regions of ‘elective affinity’ and their implications for religious education and human rights education?     

Young children's enactments of human rights in early childhood education

This paper explores ways in which human rights become part of and affect young children's everyday practices in early childhood education and, more particularly, how very young children enact human rights in the preschool setting. The study is conducted in a Swedish preschool through observations of the everyday practices of a group of children aged between 1 and 3 years. With a child view based on human rights theory and childhood sociology, an action-based methodology for seeking children's perspective is used to analyse the observation data. Three rights areas are identified in which children frequently deal with human rights in their actions and where they enact a range of possible rights holder positions: ownership, influence and equal value. These rights areas, and the children's various enactments of the rights, are reflected against the preschool context as a co-constructor to the actions of the participants.     

Responses of Liberal Democratic Societies to Claims from Ethnic Minorities to Community Rights

Immigrants within European and North American countries, with their different religions and ways of life, pose many challenges to the receiving countries' liberal values and ways of life. These challenges express themselves in the form of cultural conflicts played out within the microcosm of the schools. The paper explores the place of minority rights within two liberal societies and examines how the societies' different procedures and ideology resulted in different outcomes for minority rights. These are examined in relation to two selected court cases involving cultural and religious expression through the wearing of religious or cultural attire in schools which attempted to ban these religious or cultural attire despite claims that these 'dress' or attire constituted a religious requirement or an intrinsic aspect of a way of life. The first case involves the wearing of headscarves (called foulards) by Muslim school girls in France, while the second case involves the wearing of a turban by a Sikh pupil. Attempts are made to discuss broader issues of cultural minority community rights within liberal democratic and human rights frameworks.     

国际人权教育的历史和理念

进入20世纪70年代,人权教育倍受国际注目。21世纪乃“人权的世纪”,这正成为世人的共识,在国际人权教育迅速发展的今天,如何全面把握人权教育的历史和理念,推进人权教育的顺利发展,无疑是我国教育工作教育面临的重要而紧迫的课题,为此,本文从历史和国际的视角,就欧洲评议会、联合国教科文组织、世界人权会议、联合国儿童基金会、联合国人权中心关于人权教育的理念进行简要述评。     

Translating human rights principles into classroom practices: inequities in educating about human rights

The overarching aim of this paper is to explore how key principles inherent in human rights declarations and conventions are translated into practices associated with human rights education within school contexts. It is argued that this translation from discourse to practice opens up the potential for children and young people to encounter inequitable experiences of human rights education, and that this is an ethical issue that needs addressing. Within the paper, human rights education relates to both direct teaching about human rights, and to children and young peoples’ experiences of how school practitioners acknowledge and uphold their rights. In both national and international contexts, knowledge and understanding about school-based human rights education is lacking; this paper aims to address this issue by developing a theoretical framework through which to view human rights education practices within school settings.     

浅议人道主义干预

人权从来就是一项不客忽视的关于人的公民权、政治权、经济权和社会文化权利的集合，无论是自然法，还是实在法，对人权的内容都保护有加，人权作为一种现实，在浩瀚的历史荡涤中，愈加丰富和复杂，保护人类生存和发展的权利毋庸质疑，人道主义干预有其合理的一面，有理有节地利用这一点，将是人类社会的一个巨大贡献，相反却只能破坏我们人类共同的家园。     

Group Identity,Individual Autonomy and Education for Human Rights

The United Nations Declarations of Human Rights (1948) express an ideal for the protection of cultural rights of everyone. They propose an education that is multicultural and non‐discriminatory and recognise that parents have the right to choose their children's education. Article 13.3 of the International covenant on Economic and Social and Cultural Rights gave parents the right to choose for their children “schools other than those established by public authorities to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions”. The paper feels uneasy with this principle that grants parents the right to educate their children in conformity with their own convictions. Such rights could result in restricting the education of children to the narrow framework of parental beliefs and values that could be antithetical to social harmony, individual autonomy and equal opportunity. The question is, should such a right be extended to all parents including those who believe in racial superiority, in apartheid, Nazism or Fascism or in the inherent intellectual differences between boys and girls? The paper discusses some of these issues and asks how can the best interests of the child be served in a pluralist, multicultural, multiracial society. The paper acknowledges that in a pluralistic democratic society there will always be tensions between the public interests, the interests of the group and the interests or autonomy of the individual. These interests are discussed within the framework of fundamental human rights, common or separate schooling and multicultural education. The paper sees these as interrelated issues which are connected with group identity and equal opportunity. Where these interrelated issues conflict, the paper takes the stance that the rights and the autonomy of the individual should take precedence over the others, especially if the notion of human rights and human dignity is to be preserved in practice. This is obviously a controversial issue and the hope is that the paper will open up these issues for further discussion and debate.     

试论英国大宪章人权思想的产生、发展及其世界影响

在英国人权发展史上，大宪章占有重要的历史地位，它的产生是由于英国人民反对封建王权的需要，是英国人民与封建国王反复斗争的结果，大宪章的诞生，宣告了人权时代的到来，标志着人类的人权实践进入了一个新的阶段，大宪章的诞生，是人权发展史上一个伟大的里程碑，具有深远的世界影响，大宪章奠定的人权原则，很快传遍欧洲大陆和美国，成为西方明的基础；第二次世界大战后，由于联合国的努力，大宪章的原则被世界各国认可。联合国人权委员会在制定《世界人权宣言》时，认真研究了英国大宪章的内容，采纳了其主要观点，由于英国大宪章影响了美国的人权政策，也影响着世界各国人权政策的发展，所以英国前首相撒切尔夫人在谈到人权问题时，曾经给予英国大宪章高度评价，她说大宪章在历史上发挥过作用，今后“仍将加强整个欧洲的权利、自由和法治”。应当说她的这一评价是比较客观的。     

论失地农民的基本人权与保障

在我国失地农民是一个庞大的群体,这一群体的基本人权在城市化过程中并没有得到切实的实现。他们的基本人权主要包括生存权、劳动权、平等权,发展权。失地农民个人应该增强自己的维权意识,自觉维护人权;政府应改革征地补偿制度和户籍制度,建立健全社会保障体系,完善有关人权的法律法规与就业制度和推进经济建设,加大对失地农民的政策扶持力度;社会各界都要行动起来,包括企业、城市居民、教育机构和社区等都要发挥各自的作用,为维护失地农民的基本人权而努力。     

Liberal Education and the Teleological Question; or Why Should a Dentist Read Chaucer?

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post‐religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos.     

人权教育:奠定现代公民社会的和谐基础——联合国《人权教学入门——中小学校的实践活动》述评

以联合国人权事务高级专员办事处编撰的《人权教学入门——中小学校的实践活动》为述评对象,提炼其理念、内容、话题和实施方式,特别讨论其中教师自身人权素养对学校人权教育具体实施所具有的直接影响;文章最后论述实施和创新人权教育中所特具的"中国问题",认为:看好中国人权理论和实践的发展前景——这是实施人权教育的基本前提;教育行政部门主导研制相应政策、法规条文和教学读物——这是实施人权教育的制度保障;学校努力营造校园人权文化氛围——这是实施人权教育的基础条件;教师对当前世界人权理念和现实的自觉体认——这是实施人权教育的本体要素。     

Affect and counter-conduct: cultivating action for social change in human rights education

This paper explores the entanglement between two partially connected concerns that offer the potential to animate current discussions on human rights teaching and learning: ‘affect’ and ‘counter-conduct’. Both terms are at the heart of human rights education (HRE) approaches that aim at cultivating resistance in children and youth so that they respond in critically affective and action-oriented ways to human rights violations and social injustices in ‘the everyday’. These concepts are used to explore: first, how to encourage children and youth to enact forms of counter-conduct that are critical in human rights struggles, rather than responses which are sedimented through the governing technologies of declarational approaches of HRE; and second, how these counter-conduct practices may constitute ethical and political practices that critique liberal and sentimental forms of affect about human rights violations. It is argued that theoretical insights that pay attention to counter-conduct and affect offer possibilities for reconsidering normalized ideas in HRE.     

Responding to parental objections to school sexuality education: a selection of 12 objections

Sexuality education for school‐aged young people is a crucial component of all quality education systems. It prepares young people for participation in society as responsible, mature and community‐minded citizens. Most contemporary school education curricula generally aim to enhance young people's knowledge, skills and understandings of the world, and of their rights as human beings and citizens of nations. The current sexuality problems of many young people are the opposite of these; namely, ignorance, lack of skills, misunderstandings, and loss of rights, as well as unnecessary fear and shame about themselves and others. Many young people do not receive any sexuality education at all, and frequently parents have been found to be unsatisfactory providers of sexuality education for their offspring. Schools, then, become the logical place to provide this. Nowadays, the earlier maturing of girls and boys provides a further persuasive argument for quality sexuality education in all schools. The absence or erosion of school‐based sexuality education through ignorance, fear or unreasoned response helps support ignorance about sexual behaviours, increased rates of unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and the cruel loss of life opportunities for young people. The present paper responds to 12 parental objections to school sexuality education, by providing research facts and evidence‐based reasoned arguments to them.     

Teachers’ pedagogical perspectives and teaching practices on human rights in Cyprus: an empirical exploration and implications for human rights education

This paper describes a qualitative study that explored the understandings of human rights, pedagogical perspectives and practices in human rights teaching of three Greek-Cypriot elementary teachers. The study revealed some significant challenges in human rights teaching that seemed to be common for all three participating teachers. First, all of the teachers experienced pedagogical difficulties in defining and talking about human rights. A second challenge was that these difficulties seemed to influence both their pedagogical perspectives about the teaching of human rights and their teaching practices. And the third challenge was that the difficulties that teachers faced in preparing their lessons were also reflected in their teaching practices in four ways: the dominance of a “declarational” approach; decontextualization; the trivialization of human rights; and the retreat to familiar discourses and activities. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for teachers, teacher educators, and theory in human rights education.     

FRENCH

Abstract

Today's education for civic engagement requires a global dimension. To live responsibly in their own communities, young people need to situate their personal and local interests in the context of their global interconnections. Bridging the personal, local, and global begins with an awareness of the universal aspirations for dignity and human rights widely shared across the human family. Increasingly, social educators recognize the need for American students to encounter the fundamental principles of human rights and humanitarian law as part of their own history and civic preparation. This article highlights pedagogically well designed human rights curricula that are available to educators online and typically without cost.     

The Human Right of Home Education

Abstract

Homeschooling is legal and growing in many countries but is virtually forbidden by law in Germany and a few others. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has reviewed and upheld this ban. Is home education a human right? How do these courts employ their jurisprudence of proportionality to find banning home education does not violate relevant constitutional or human rights norms? Why does Germany forbid home education? Why does the ECtHR uphold Germany’s position? What does this divergence imply about the right of home education and the jurisprudence of these courts? If the promise of human rights is individual liberty then a system that justifies or endorses state control of education for the purpose of cultural conformity can be said to be far too statist for a free and democratic society. In this article, I argue that both the German Constitutional Court (FCC) and the ECtHR have adopted an approach to education rights that is profoundly mistaken. I conclude that home education is a right of parents and children that must be protected by every state. Nations that respect and protect the right of parents and children to home educate demonstrate a commitment to respecting human rights; nations that do not, such as Germany and Sweden need to take steps to correct their failure to protect this important human right.     

Producing neoliberal citizens: critical reflections on human rights education in Pakistan

This paper challenges the celebratory uptake of human rights education (HRE) in postcolonial contexts by making visible the ideological and political entanglements of the discourse with neoliberal assumptions of citizenship. I draw evidence from, and critically reflect on, a specific HRE programme – a series of summer camps for girls entitled, Women Leaders of Tomorrow (WLT) – that a colleague and I implemented in Pakistan. Using narrative inquiry methodology, I examine the kinds of citizens imagined in and through its curriculum, and the norms of leadership and community promoted by it, to argue that the programme can be interpreted as a technology of neoliberalism in that it was productive of neoliberal rationalities. Individuals, however, are not simply objects of knowledges; they co-opt, resist, negotiate, and compromise. I, thus, disturb my own linear reading of the unfolding of WLT by reflecting on moments of resistances where participants not only interrogated its assumptions but also engaged in self-stylisations that produced new mutations of HRE. This unfolding of a globalist discourse in a local setting directs me to call for a re-conceptualisation of HRE in postcolonial contexts that is multiple, contingent, and fluid.     

Human rights,education for democratic citizenship and international organisations: findings from a Kuwaiti UNESCO ASPnet school

While universal human rights frameworks and democratic models of government have gained global support and even adherence, they often exist in tension with local cultural and religious practices. In Kuwait, tensions arise between its constitution, legal system and Islam, with several groups consequently marginalised. These tensions extend into the education system. This paper seeks to explore both theoretically and contextually the potential of a curricular module introduced in 2006 in deepening education for democratic citizenship in Kuwait. Theoretical analysis reveals the module, introduced without altering the authoritarian ethos of the system, to be quite a thin engagement with the concepts of rights and democracy. However, its enactment within the case study school – both representative of an authoritarian state school and a member of UNESCO’s Associated Schools Project Network (ASPnet) – uncovered its deeper potential and perhaps discovered the reason for its swift relegation from a three-year to a one-year programme.     

Back to Basic Values: education for justice and peace in the world

Abstract

Religious education refers to basic, sacred texts. Education also has basic, secular texts. ‘Back to basics’ should include basic values which are found in human rights instruments. Human rights are sometimes erroneously referred to as a Western and Northern values system, but the article notes an Islamic tradition of acknowledging human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 ushered in a multiplicity of human rights texts that are international and which educators can confidently use as standards in any circumstances. In schools in which linguistic, cultural, religious and ethnic pluralism is a fact of life, these principles are helpful guidelines for conduct and policy. All major human rights texts start with a reaffirmation of a commitment to equality of rights and equality of dignity. Programmes to develop race or gender equality and to enhance opportunities for those with special needs and disabilities are essentially concerned with human rights.