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



perspective on cultural diversity: culturally diverse children embody
and enact their culture. They are the bearers of culture, not its
active producers. Thus cultural rights in education appear to de-
individualise, and render human rights values potentially
problematic, whether in the apparent denial of autonomy in relation
to cultural identity or in contexts where community values may be
opposed to human rights values.

Another key problematic issue is the ambivalent status of the child
as a human rights subject, when juxtaposed to the parent-child
relationship. The CRC is path-breaking in its insistence on the
human rights of the child when compared with, for example, the
European Convention, 1950, or the ICESCR, 1966, where children
are constructed as the property of their parents. In the European
Convention it is parents who have the right to “education and
teaching ... [being] in conformity with their own religious and
philosophical convictions”. In Article 13 of the ICESCR parents
have the right to “ensure the religious and moral education of their
children [is] in conformity with their own convictions”. Although
these concerns have their origins in the rationale for the
establishment of human rights, to avoid the educational
indoctrination of the Nazi era, by giving parents the right to make
educational choices, the end result was to construct children as
the property of parents and as the objects of choice of education
on parents’ moral, religious or philosophical grounds.

Focusing on the rights of children, the CRC moves away from such
privileging of parental rights. Instead, parents are constructed as
the sources of children’s identity - their culture, language and

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