Abstract
The biggest problem facing schools having social justice curricula, beyond implementation of a programme, I claim, is the problem of justification: what grounds what in social justice and how do we make this manifest to ourselves and to the curricula? If we cannot address this, then social justice curricula are doomed to begging the question. I claim that a ranking of human rights is not only necessary to adjudicate competing claims for social justice and at the same time, thwart interference with already agreed-upon human rights: it is necessary for any curriculum of social justice for schools. That is to say, curricular programs of social justice cannot justify social practices that interfere with human rights, nor can they teach otherwise than this. Due attention to the violation of human rights is necessary, I shall argue, and must be central in the discussion of education for social justice.
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Notes
David Miller separates rights from deserts and needs and considers all of these as ‘models’ of social justice. This account of social justice sees rights as in no better a philosophical position than the other two. I do not subscribe to Miller’s allocation of rights as a ‘model’ competing with other models. I see rights as basic and necessary for the possibility of needs and desert-based accounts of justice.
Kymlicka (2002, p. 285). The rise of citizenship theory is perhaps thought to be a replacement or at the very least, an improvement upon, liberal-democratic procedural theories such as that of Rawlsian distributive justice. Though Kymlicka has his doubts about this claim (p. 286), nevertheless, it seems correct to say that the grip of distributive justice is slowly loosening.
Specifically, Miller no longer considers distributive justice the pre-eminent form of justice. Justice is much more inclusive for Miller than in his older publications. No doubt, this has much to do with Miller’s turn to desert as carrying more political weight than either rights or needs.
This is true of Brian Orend, who comments on the contemporary North American social justice curricula. See Orend (2004).
Kymlicka (2002, p. 368). Of the place of philosophers and their contributions to the debate on multiculturalism, Kymlicka opines that until evidence is forthcoming as to how this will affect social unity and political stability, philosophical speculation can contribute little.
Sharon Todd, “Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of rights, freedom and justice.” Todd seems to think that the UDHR is [only?] understood as a set of philosophically articulated universal rights. This is correct, as far as it goes. It is not necessarily how the UN, or the international human rights committees such as UNESCO, thinks of these, though. Certainly, the history of the philosophical understanding of rights is built into the self-understandings of these institutions. However, the ‘gold standard’ for these rights is “hard legal commitments…” (Kymlicka 2007, p. 44). Of course, it can be taught this way (and I think there are strong reasons, such as the ones I am arguing for, that it should).
While competing foundational theories for human rights abound, none has achieved significant consensus. Although this may leave the theory of human rights, like many moral and legal theories, somewhat unmoored, it may be enough to show that human rights are necessary or useful or advantageous to individuals and to human society as a whole (Freeman and Van Ert 2004, p. 25).
I am thinking of the International Covenants (ICSECR; ICCPR) in particular.
If we are to believe Will Kymlicka, the international community, though averse to the issue of granting minority rights, appeals to the universal ideas of rights as inherent in all human beings. This Kymlicka sets in juxtaposition to the supposed influence of “cultural relativism” and “postmodernist cultural theorists.” “In reality, far from challenging these universalist ideas, the justification given by international organizations for adopting minority rights appeal to these very ideas” (Kymlicka 2007, p. 45).
Sharon Todd, “Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of rights, freedom and justice.” Again, Todd seems to think that we are already engaging in discussions of justification in human rights education. I believe this to be presumptuous. Anecdotally, I have heard that it is difficult enough to get high school students to see others as deserving of empathy, let alone work to develop a set of criteria by which social justice issues can be adjudicated. Often, it is enough to make them aware of the various roles international agencies play. There is little time or inclination left over for disputes about the philosophical or legal basis of human rights. Even if there were time to do justice to these issues, this would presuppose an understanding of the philosophical, legal, and historical backdrop to human rights that the curriculum is in no position to provide. One means of getting around this is suggested by Todd: to integrate human rights into the curriculum rather than presenting it as a separate classroom subject. I think this is a very good suggestion.
It is generally accepted that many of the rights have few corresponding duties, beyond the requirement of the state to protect these rights. Certainly, persons do not have corresponding obligations with respect to first generation rights. Minority rights have been, and continue to be, a contentious issue. None of the extant conventions proclaim national self-determination for minority nations within larger states, though Article 27 of the ICCPR has been interpreted as leaning towards this.
Kymlicka is correct when he notes that none of the covenants suggests personal rights or ‘Basic’ Rights are superseded by economic, social, cultural, linguistic, minority, or indigenous Rights. One explanation for this—the one Kymlicka gives—is legislators were loath to undermine, challenge, or even question, the priority of rights. The question of minority rights in particular, is not addressed until the 1980s (Kymlicka 2007, pp. 29–31). This has since changed, and a plethora of international and regional documents have been produced, some of these insisting upon provisions of equal legal strength for minority rights culminating in the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to national or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992), and amplified in terms of culture in UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001). The same goes for indigenous rights; beginning in the 1990s, these rights became more and more a focus of international and regional bodies, culminating in the passage of The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2006). Indigenous people’s rights, together with minority rights, are Rights (some say Fourth) that are as basic as ‘basic’ or personal Rights. At least, this is how the Declarations read. Nevertheless, these Declarations all insist that ‘basic’ rights are not to be seconded; all citizens that qualify are equally recognized as having basic and minority or indigenous rights.
Kant discusses “Right” in his last published work on ethics, the Metaphysics of Morals. For Kant, Right is purely political. It is the condition that accrues to persons that live under a constitutional sovereign. Right is made possible through the Universal Law of Right. Thus the universal law of right, so act externally that the free use of your choice can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law, is indeed a law that lays an obligation on me, but it does not at all expect, far less demand, that I myself should limit my freedom to those conditions just for the sake of this obligation; instead, reason says only that freedom is limited to those conditions in conformity with the idea of it and that it may also be actively limited by others; and it says this as a postulate that is incapable of further proof (Kant 1996, 6, p. 231).
Will Kymlicka is perhaps the most prolific of these thinkers. He is particularly concerned with the issue of minority rights in (majoritarian) nations.
Both self-respect and employment are ‘basic goods’ each citizen is entitled to. However, self-(and other) respect, at least in A Theory of Justice, is primary. Of course, Rawls does not put the question of ‘goods’ this way. Nevertheless, he does lexically rank the principles of justice. And he does make self-respect and autonomy (inclusive of dignity) the primary good. See further Rawls (1971).
If anything, post-communist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia cling tightly to this ‘republican’ understanding of human rights. Rights as individual are often trumpeted to the detriment of collective, minority rights. Indeed, it is not too much to say, with Kymlicka, that many post-communist European and Central Asian nations have worked hard to avoid the issue of minority nation status, and Western European nations have not been much better. See Kymlicka (2007, pp. 209–211).
Smith and Fairman are discussing a curriculum for high school students called, Workable Peace, developed by the Consensus Building Institute. The curriculum stresses conflict resolution through negotiation, the development of empathy towards others, and peaceful resolution. The curriculum draws on human rights to define the criteria by which negotiations are to be made, and to discern what negotiators can agree with. This sentiment is not too far from Habermas’s ‘stakeholder’ requirement (that all stakeholders have the right and availability to discourse; Habermas 1990) and Kant’s idea of a universal consensus as necessary for the construction of judgments of moral worth.
Note that I am not suggesting we retrieve the older notion of rights as ‘natural.’ Nevertheless, the sort of justification and criteria seem to me to be needed if charges such as those leveled by (for example) the Information Office of the State Council, Beijing, in 1991, is to be adjudicated in a non-question-begging manner. Briefly, the White Paper the Office produced argued that first generation rights should follow second-generation ones, in developing nations. There was no question of the priority of Right. Other organizations representing east-Asian nations meet in regional conferences before the 1993 Second World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, and drafted a statement to the effect that human rights “must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds” (Steiner and Alston 2000, p. 569).
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This is an expansion of a paper, I read at the 2006 International Network of Philosophers of Education Conference (INPE) in Malta.
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Johnston, J.S. Prioritizing Rights in the Social Justice Curriculum. Stud Philos Educ 28, 119–133 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9100-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9100-8