moment for/in national education systems, away from simple forms
of assimilation and reproduction of national identity towards
embracing the difference and diversity of plural nation states.
Here the right to education challenges the traditional powers of the
national state to use education to simply reproduce the ‘imagined
community’ of the nation, by invoking the unitary national culture
privileged in long-standing human rights practices of national
cultural relativism.
Furthermore, subsection (c) is perhaps a classic statement of
pluralist values: the recognition of cultural diversity within nation
states and the requirement that all cultures be treated equally.
Equal treatment in education entails radical changes in curriculum,
pedagogy and, quite possibly, systemic institutional governance,
structures and practices. This subsection therefore extends the
reach of cultural relativism from its traditional location in nations as
units of human rights enactment to new intra-nation sites of
institutions and practices. Implementing this new form of cultural
relativism in education requires a radical overhauling of everything.
Enshrining these radical pluralist, multi-cultural values in the official
and hidden curricula of education systems is clearly problematic.
Evidence for this can be found by scrutinising the curricular
contents of national education systems, in the continuing calls for
developing intercultural education, and in the sometimes
acrimonious politics of curriculum change (see Phillips, 1998, for a
discussion of the battles over the English history curriculum).
International evidence for non-compliance can be found in General
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