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NERA 2011 CongressRights and EducationJyväskylä 10-12 March, 2011

Children’s rights in education:ambivalences and tensions

Leena AlanenUniversity 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 pre-

eminent; integrated – not balanced3) 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) The study of normal childhood;2) A critique of the conventional socialization frame;3) Agency and voice for children;4) Structural constraints on childhood;5) 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

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 (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

• for children ~ ’proposed childhoods’• with children ~ ’co-constructed childhoods’• by children ~ ’children’s childhoods’

The multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies• 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.