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

in the ongoing struggle for access to education. For example,
what is notable in the context of the 60 year-long history of the
right to education is the continuing demand for governments to
implement free primary education, most recently reiterated in the
push for Education For All in the 1990 Jomtien World Declaration
(UNESCO, 1990) and the 2000 Dakar Framework for Action
(UNESCO, 2000), as well as in the 3rd Millennium Development
Goal (UN, 2000) to achieve universal primary education. The
political and policy logic behind this continuing exhortation is
continuing non-compliance, mainly as a consequence of lack of
economic capacity (Tomasevski, 2003; Unterhalter, 2007). Thus,
there is a sense in which the universality of the right to education is
fundamentally undermined by its status as a second generation
right.

The second difficulty is that the notion of universalism deployed is
reminiscent of the universality of citizenship - a social abstraction
which regards all individuals as essentially equal with respect to a
particular status. In the case of human rights, this is the equality of
being human. Universalism, in this context, constructs a
problematic essentialist, pre-social human being and ignores
unequal social, economic and political social structures and the
lived reality of social inequalities, both within and across countries.
In this sense human rights actually do resemble citizenship rights:
in both sets of rights, equality in one important arena co-exists
with, and claims to legitimate, inequalities in other domains of the
social. Key critical issues arise from this in educational contexts.

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