Abstract
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly recognizes that children are entitled to the full range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. Despite the powerful social function of early years textbooks in legitimizing cultural norms in primary and secondary education, there has been little attention on human rights issues in early childhood education (ECE) curricular materials. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the explicit and implicit representation of human rights education (HRE) in Spanish ECE textbooks. Our quantitative and qualitative result show that ECE textbooks failed to find any explicit mention of children’s rights; an excessive attention focused on the teaching of responsibilities; a distorted representation of childhood; a lack of representation of those responsible for children's rights; a justification to avoid the adults’ loss of power; and the idea that teaching children as a citizens with rights constitutes inappropriate politicization of the school.
Highlights
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) explicitly recognizes that children are entitled to the full range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights
Different international organizations have formally articulated their awareness of these rights: the UN General Assembly has adopted the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training (UNDHRET) (United Nations, 2011), while the Council of Europe has adopted the Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education (EDC/human rights education (HRE)) in the framework of Recommendation CM/Rec(2010)7
As little research has considered the role of education for children’s and young people’s growth as rights holders (Quennerstedt and Quennerstedt, 2014), this study aims to analyze the explicit and implicit representation of HRE in that were reflected in the written text of any page of the Spanish early childhood education (ECE) textbooks published from 2006 to 2013
Summary
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) explicitly recognizes that children are entitled to the full range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. The concept of human rights education (HRE) has evolved in recent decades. Recognizing that understanding of HRE depends on the social and cultural environment (Bajaj, 2011), scholars have developed a three-dimensional model for its analysis: education "about,” "through," and "in/for" human rights. The dimension "in" focuses on actively empowering individuals to detect injustices, inequalities, and violations of human rights (Ely-Yamin, 1993; Meintjes, 1997; Tibbitts, 2002; Mihr, 2004)
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