Abstract
This chapter summarises the global dominance of human rights discourse and the well-established international consensus on its importance, focusing on how HRE has proliferated from the mid-1990s onwards. Instead of advancing criticality as a central purpose of education, however, HRE, as co-constructed within the agencies of the United Nations, became the uncritical legitimating arm of human rights universals. Thus, it has ultimately contributed to the counter-hegemonic distrust in human rights that we experience today. Popular and dominant formulations of HRE, we argue, lack the conceptual and practical resources to be transformative, let alone emancipatory. Steering our reasoning through the historical development of HRE, we conclude that the time for Critical Human Rights Education has arrived.
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Notes
- 1.
The United Nations Development Reports provide a good indication of the world’s challenges, see, for example, http://hdr.undp.org/en/2014-report; World Report from Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015
- 2.
See the reports available on human rights education as submitted to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Education/Training/Pages/ HREducationTrainingIndex.aspx
- 3.
For instance, see Tomasevski (2005a) for a comprehensive analysis on Education as a human right or as a traded service. Also note Tomasevski’s (2005b, p. 237) conclusion on her reflections as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education from 1998 to 2004: the World Bank is the lead agency in education and does not recognise education as a human right.
- 4.
See the Donnelly-Gibb exchange in Egendorf (2003): Human Rights: Opposing Viewpoints.
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Zembylas, M., Keet, A. (2019). It Is Time: Critical Human Rights Education in an Age of Counter-Hegemonic Distrust. In: Critical Human Rights Education. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27198-5_2
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