Transcript NERA 2011 Congress Rights and Education

NERA 2011 Congress
Rights and Education
Jyväskylä 10-12 March, 2011
Children’s rights in education:
ambivalences and tensions
Leena Alanen
University of Jyväskylä
Department of Educational Sciences
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The ’age of rights’
• Global diffusion of a human rights culture
• International human rights law
• Claims framed in the language of ’rights’
• The ’age of rights’ (Bobbio 1996);
• The ’international rights revolution (Ignatieff 2001);
• The ’world’s first universal ideology’ (Weissbrodt 1988).
• The concept of human rights as the most obvious expression
of a moral ideal, but permeated with legal conceptions;
• ”Legalization” of human rights”
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Children’s human rights
• The idea of human rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948):
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one
another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this
Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin,
property, birth or other status.
• Children’s rights
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UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
(1989)
• “… without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the
child's or his or her parent's or legal guardian's race, colour,
sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national,
ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other
status.” (Article 2.)
• 3 P’s:
(1) protection rights
(2) provision rights
(3) participation rights
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Participation rights
• States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of
forming his or her own views the right to express those views
freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child
being given due weight in accordance with the age and
maturity of the child. (Article 12. )
• The right to freedom of expression (Article 13.)
• The right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of
all kinds, and
• the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion
(Article 14.)
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Children’s rights movements
• The liberationist movement, 1970s
• The protectionist approach
• ’Liberal paternalism’
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Tensions within the UNCRC:
Children’s views? Or welfare?
• Centrality of a child’s views (Article 12)
or
• The principle of welfare (Article 3):
“In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public
or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative
authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall
be a primary consideration.”
• Balancing
– between possessors of rights:
children vs. parents? teachers vs. children?
– between types of rights:
autonomy or protection?
– between types of obligations:
rights vs. responsibilities
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False dichotomies...
1) Respect for children implies no diminution of respect for
the adults who care for them or teach them;
2) Neither autonomy rights nor protection rights are preeminent; integrated – not balanced
3) Rights need not be balanced by responsibilities
― Enforcement of legal laws: obligation of the government
(state), not the reponsibility of private parties;
― Rights do not exist in a zero-sum environment
― Human rights have no meaning if they do not accompany
the status of human being – the conception of human rights
is not limited to good, responsible children!
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Just two questions
1. Are children persons deserving our respect?
2. What interests must be protected for a child to be a
meaningful participant in community life and, in so
doing, to develop and express her or his unique
personality?
— Normative analysis: what are the criteria for
children’s ”meaningful participation”
— Social impact analyses: what are the effects of
policies, programs, settings and situation
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Interpreting children’s rights
• The discourse of ”rights-talk”: Rights that children have:
the child as an individual rights-holder
• Rights
– conceived as an ”end of the dialogue”;
– solutions to problems in the legal rule;
– debate on children’s rights changes into a debate on
children’s legal status (legal equality as citizens).
• ”Rights-talk”: forceful, compelling
• Arguments against its inherent individualism
– Communitarians
– Feminist scepticism
– Childhood Studies: the ’social child’
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Childhood Studies and the ’social child’
• The dominant paradigm the 20th century: psychology of child
development (Piaget etc.)
• Sociology, anthropology
• 1970s: disciplinary boundaries become unclear
– Social context, social processes;
– Symbolic interactionism;
• 1980s: new metatheories (socio- constructionism,
postmodernism, deconstruction)
— Critiques of the representations of the child, and the role of child
research (knowledge) in regulating children’s lives;
— History of childhood (Ariès): childhood is a historical construction;
— Sociology, political economy, social policy.
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New social scientific study of children and
childhood
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
The study of normal childhood;
A critique of the conventional socialization frame;
Agency and voice for children;
Structural constraints on childhood;
The use of ordinary scientific methods to study children and
childhood.
The ’social child’: children’s agency and voice
— Implications for the ethics of child research
— Ontological presuppositions: the ’always already social child’
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Childhood Studies and children’s rights
• Coincident emergence (common breeding ground?)
• Parallel notions:
– Agency, children as social sctors (Childhood Studies)
– Participation rights (Children’s rights)
• Children’s rights within child research -> the new ’paradigms’
in Childhood Studies;
• But missing: the sociology of children’s rights
— 1990s: Sociology of human rights
— Childhood Studies as an integrative frame
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Rights-based policy and practice in Early
Childhood Education
The most influential perspectives in ECE (Woodhead 2006):
1. The developmental perspective
2. The economic and political perspective
3. The social and cultural perspective
4. The human rights perspective
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1. The developmental perspective
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
Children are developmental beings (or ”becomings”);
Emphasis on
1) regularities in children’s physical and psychological
growth during early childhood
– childhood is a formative phase of life;
2) dependencies and vulnerabilities during early
childhood
Psychological sciences (incl. neurosciences); Special
education
Goal: opitimising children’s development
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2. The economic and political perspective
 Children are ”human capital”
– targets of investment through social and educational
interventions (e.g. pre-school programmes)
– with profitable returns to the investments made
• E.g. a pre-school programme may yield a 400 % return
on the initial investment in terms of reduced
expenditure on special education, social welfare, youth
justice, …
 Economics (cost-benefit analysis)
 Builds on a developmental paradigm: the distinctive universal
features of early development
 Instrumental view of young children as a natural resource to
be exploited ► ethical objections…
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3. The social and cultural perspective
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
(Early) childhood is a socially and culturally constructed status,
i.e. socially and culturally variable
It is therefore also practiced in a diversity of ways
•
•
•
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
~ ’proposed childhoods’
~ ’co-constructed childhoods’
~ ’children’s childhoods’
The multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies
•
•

for children
with children
by children
Sociology, anthropology, history, geography…
Emerged in the 1980s in part as a critique of the dominant
developmental paradigm, e.g.:
– The assumption of universal development is culture specific
– Children are homogenized <-> diversity
Features of early childhood are produced by specific
economic, social and cultural processes (and children, too, are
actors within these processes)
Heavily dominated by social constructionism -> problems of
social and cultural relativism, leading to moral and political relativity
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4. The human rights perspective
•
•
•
•
•
•
A new, universal paradigm for ECE policy and practice
• but a universalism different from the universalizing
developmental paradigm;
The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989)
Also contested, e.g. for endorsing distinctively Western liberal
and individualistic discourses of childhood;
The UNCRC is also a very general statement, and draws heavily
on concepts that are open to a wide range of interpretation;
The emphasis of Childhood Studies resonates with respect for
children’s rights (construction, children’s agency)
Implementation within early childhood policies and practices is
still only at the beginning.
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Towards rethinking children’s rights
• Sociology:
– No foundation for a theory of rights;
– A heritage of scepticism towards normativity;
• Citizenship, instead of rights
– Perceived individualism of rights ;
• the assumption of autonomy of rights-bearers;
• grounded on legalistic discourse.
• Shifts in social theory and research thinking...
1) The global diffusion of human rights -> topic to study in Global Studies
2)
The ’normative turn’ in social sciences,
3) The ’relational turn’ in social sciences
4) The ethic of care
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The ’relational turn’: thinking in terms of relations
• Relationality
• “Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma:
whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily
in substances or in processes, in static “things” or in dynamic,
unfolding relations. Large segments of the sociological
community continue implicitly or explicitly to prefer the former
point of view. Rational-actor and norm-based analyses – diverse
holisms and structuralisms, and statistical “variable” analyses –
all of them beholden to the idea that it is entities that come first
and relations among them only subsequently.”
(Emirbayer 1997)
• Pierre Bourdieu: ”The stuff of social reality is relational.”
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A relational discourse of rights
• Feminist ethics and political theory
• Ethic of care (”second generation theory”)
Persons: relational and interdependent
• In contrast to the notion of (legal or moral) rights that attach to
persons as individuals, and
• therefore tends to call attention to individuals and their possessions
and entitlements,
• whereas the emphasis in care ethic is on relations between persons.
• Challenges the centring of rights in liberal legal theory on autonomy
and independence (instead of interdependence), and
• Calls for reconstructions of existing concepts of rights.
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