Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: a propos of a minority educational reform



variety of national projects (Green, 1990) - nation-building,
empire-building, welfare provision and so on - and are, thus,
deeply embedded in national institutional structures, histories,
traditions and practices. Educational systems are the repositories
and (re)producers,
par excellence, of nations and cultures. Thus
cultural relativism is embedded not only in the subsidiarity principle
of enacting human rights within the boundaries of the nation state,
but also in the mechanisms of enactment, through national
educational systems.

Where Article 29 takes us beyond this specific national(ist)
problematic and related tensions between universalism and
cultural relativism is in subsection (c). Here cultural relativism is
placed within, rather than only between, nation states. This
subsection states that education must promote

“The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or
her cultural identity, language and values, for the national
values of the country in which the child is living, the country
from which he or she may originate, and for civilisations
different from his or her own”

It is here that the right to education in the CRC addresses the
concerns of the increasing (or increasingly recognised) multi-
culturalism of nation states and growing social and cultural
diversity in previously (putatively) mono-cultural, national schools.
Article 29 requires specific actions regarding curriculum and
pedagogy in response to these changes. Using Fraser’s (1997)
typology of the forms of politics of justice, Article 29 invokes and
embeds the justice of recognition to challenge cultural domination,
non-recognition and disrespect. This is a crucial progressive

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