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

values. This discursive shift, from the rights of parents to make
educational choices on moral, philosophical or religious grounds,
to the rights of children to bear (imposed) identities, brings us back
to the communitarian conundrum. Article 29 not only privileges a
communitarian notion of differences of cultures and ethnicities, but
also constructs children unproblematically as members of their
cultural community of (the accident of) birth. Thus children are
both autonomous human rights subjects and non-autonomous
bearers of communal identities. The resolution of the tensions
between the two forms of cultural relativism embedded in the right
to education, between inter- and intra-nation cultural rights, by
means of invoking a static, simple communitarian notion of values,
would appear to potentially undermine the rights of the child.

Conclusion

In this article I have explored different ambiguities and tensions in
the right to education. Article 28, which is concerned with
educational systems, promotes a form of universality which
strongly resembles social democratic notions of meritocracy. The
celebration of equality of opportunity ignores, and potentially
obfuscates and marginalises, social inequalities as reconfigured in
education. Article 29, which is concerned with curriculum and
pedagogy, paradoxically promotes the universality of human rights
values, nation-specific cultural relativism, as well as a
communitarian notion of intra-nation cultural pluralism. Is the right
to education ‘nonsense on stilts’, to quote the arch-critic of rights,
Jeremy Bentham, or can we read these tensions and ambiguities
in a different, more generative way?

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