Abstract
The position and the validity of the Declarations on Human Rights (1948) accepted by the United Nations (UN), and the subsequent declarations on Human Rights Education and Training (2010) are questioned by many scholars in their respective fields. These discourses manifest around the universality of human rights and its applications in human rights education suitable for global, contextual, diverse and particular societies. The proclamation of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995–2004) (Resolution, 49/184), the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2004/71), the reassessments of UN Declarations on Human Rights Education (March, 2011) and UNESCO publications on human rights education (2011), illustrate the need to infuse shared values into every sphere of society. However, scholars are questioning the ontology and epistemology of human rights as a universal declaration and as the only means for legitimising human rights education for its transformative competencies and to offer its shared values for a sustainably just society. The legitimacy of this ideal of a universality of human rights as a binding factor drawn from a Western liberal philosophy, is arbitrary and limited. These limitations of human rights expose the ideal of an interconnectedness between human rights and human rights education in multilayered and multicomplex social environments. Human rights literacies and its new languages on human rights is a progressing nexus between human rights and human rights education and offers an epistemology in understanding human rights in human rights education.
No power on this earth can destroy the thirst for human dignity
Nelson Mandela
(cf. Wright, 2014 ) [Nelson Mandela during a speech at King William’s Town, Bisho, South Africa, 8 September 1992.]
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Notes
- 1.
These scholars have worked extensively on human rights education (epistemic othering; decolonisation) [Baxi, Keet, & Zembylas], and on the ontologies and epistemologies of human rights literacies [Becker, De Wet, Du Preez, Roux & Simmonds] and will be referred to and quoted where relevant.
- 2.
I have interpreted Boschki’s use of the word legend as folklore. The history of Germany’s human rights violations and atrocities carried out during WW2 is vital and the younger generation in post-WW2 could be defined as ‘outsiders’ and ‘spectators’. The young generation does not have necessarily an emotional experience of these historical events and one questions their understandings of the victims’ lived experiences of the violence and atrocities of that war.
- 3.
See Boschki (2016) for his clear and comprehensive arguments on a culture of remembrance and his critique thereof.
- 4.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly with resolution 2200A (XXI) on 19 December 1966. This resolution came into effect in 1976 as outlined in Article 49 of the covenant.
- 5.
Race and the colonial other are global issues and not only linked to specific geographical regions. Migrations of humans, be it as refugees of war-torn countries or economic migrants from poor geographical spaces, appeal for a decolonisation of knowledges and histories. This issue is further argued in our chapter in part I of this volume where we concentrate on the “interruption and disruption of these assumptions and the processes through which inclusion and exclusion are masked (legal, normative and discursive…”) (Becker & Roux, in part I of this volume).
- 6.
The ‘Born Free’ generation are children born after the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa and can be regarded as the first generation that is free from oppression of colonialism and apartheid (cf. United Nations General Assembly’s declaration (1989) on the declaration on Apartheid and the exclusion of black citizens from the democratic processes of government).
- 7.
Multilayered societies include more than simply different religions, as social and material realities have an impact on all dimensions of multireligious societies which have the propensity to culminate in violence, be it material or sectarian.
- 8.
Two important events radicalised the politics in the Middle East: The Six-day war (5th–10th June 1967) or also known as the Arab-Israeli war, and the Iranian revolution (1979) where the US-backed monarchy of the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) was overthrown on 11th February 1979. The Shah from the Pahlavi dynasty was replaced by a theocracy with the first president Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
- 9.
I would like to question the concept education “model” for human rights education reasoning for the concept “conceptual curriculum frameworks” (curriculum theory and curriculum making). The reason is that curriculum theory and conceptual curriculum frameworks (e.g. for human rights education) are imbedded and linked into the political, social and ideological discourses and developments. “Human rights education models” are presupposed to be fixed and stagnant (Becker, 2013; Becker & Du Preez, 2015; Du Preez & Reddy, 2015). Curriculum theory and curriculum making are far more complex and interlinked with the social contexts and hermeneutical implications (Du Preez & Becker, 2016; Roux, 2017; Zembylas et al., 2016). Human rights education as “subject” and/or “discipline” (Tibbitts, 2002, 2017) is linked and can only function if the political, social and ideological trends are infused in curriculum approaches and curriculum making. These aspects link human rights education directly to the lived experiences of the recipients of the curriculum.
- 10.
See chapter Becker and Roux in part III of this volume footnote 6 on the concept learner. The concept is critiqued as part of the “learnification discourse of education and human rights education”. This discourse has devastating ontological and epistemological consequences relevant to cultures of remembrance, histories, indigenous knowledges, identity and lived experiences. See also chapter Becker and Roux in part III of this volume for an exploration of the consequences of this discourse in education and human rights education.
- 11.
See footnote 9 on the question of learning strategies (didactics). Furthermore, transformational teaching-learning strategies cannot support a top-down approach where subjects are categorised in the subsequent power relations as outlined in the aims of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on a World Program for Human Rights Education (2004/71). The ideals are commendable but the ontological stance and epistemology realities are not compatible. Dissonance in political and social spaces and lived experiences needs a decolonising of knowledge that “needs a collective process by which disciplinary practices are successful in working against the inscribed epistemic injustices of all knowledge formations” (Keet, 2015, p. 28; Keet, 2017).
- 12.
See chapter Becker and Roux in part III of this volume on the notion of “socialise students” and human rights education.
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Roux, C. (2019). The ‘Literacy Turn’ in Human Rights and Human Rights Education. In: Roux, C., Becker, A. (eds) Human Rights Literacies. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99567-0_1
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