Human rights within education: assessing the justifications

While respect for human rights has long been endorsed as a goal of education, only recently has significant attention been paid to the need to incorporate rights within educational processes. Current support for human rights within education, however, has a variety of motivations. This paper provides a theoretical exploration of these diverse justifications, leading to a normative proposal. A distinction is made between status-based and instrumental approaches. Human rights within education can be justified from a status-based perspective on the basis of their indivisibility, meaning that the right to education must not entail an infringement of other rights. Yet while rights-respecting environments are important sites of learning, instrumental justifications can be a source of concern, if the goals in question are irrelevant or inimical to the enhancement of rights. An argument, therefore, is put forward for a simultaneous realisation of embodiment of and opportunity for learning about human rights.