Human rights education, politics and power

Abstract

This special issue developed from scholarly collaboration between the University of Leeds Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights Education (CCHRE) at which Audrey Osler was founding director and the Centre for Governance and Citizenship (CGC) at Hong Kong Institute of Education at which Yan Wing Leung is associate director and Audrey Osler an honorary fellow. Both centres developed a strand of research addressing human rights education and human rights and social justice in education. We undertook to edit this special edition of Education, Citizenship & Social Justice on the theme ‘Education, human rights and social justice in East Asia’ as part of a wider shared commitment to policy-relevant research that supports social justice and human rights in and through education. The large number of submissions we received attests to a lively interest in education for human rights and social justice across East Asia. Here we have selected five articles addressing education policy and practice in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. While each article addresses a specific socio-political context, we would suggest that many of the issues raised have pertinence in other regional and global contexts. As editors, we share a vision of human rights education both as a universal entitlement and as a tool to challenge injustice and support social transformation, particularly the liberation of oppressed groups. Nevertheless, we recognize huge challenges in realizing this goal through formal education and particularly through schooling. Four of the five articles here address primarily the formal sector, the education of children and children’s human rights in and through schooling. The fifth is concerned with the education and training of community activists. It also advocates a number of principles which are arguably equally relevant to schooling. One of the challenges facing human rights educators working in formal education is the strong national, and often nationalistic, basis of schooling systems, which encourage loyalty first and foremost to the nation, rather than to humankind. In certain circumstances, schools not only fail to