Andre Keet

Discourse, Betrayal, Critique

Despite being under-theorized, Human Rights Education (HRE) has evolved into a burgeoning pedagogical formation that sources its currency from a perceived consensus on human rights universals. This proliferation is paradoxically not matched by a sustained and meaningful analysis even though HRE has far-reaching implications for educational systems world-wide, given the treaty and other obligations under the United Nations architecture. Studies on HRE predominantly focus on the conversion of human standards into pedagogical and educational concerns with the integration of HRE into education systems and practices as its main objective.

It is time: Critical Human Rights Education in an age of counter-hegemonic distrust

ABSTRACTPropelled by the global dominance of human rights discourse and the well-established international consensus on its importance, Human Rights Education (HRE) has proliferated from the mid-1990s onwards. Instead of advancing criticality as a central purpose of education, HRE, as co-constructed within the agencies of the United Nations, became the uncritical legitimating arm of human rights universals. Thus, it has ultimately contributed to the counter-hegemonic distrust in human rights that we experience today. Popular and dominant formulations of HRE, I argue, lack the conceptual and practical resources to be transformative, let alone emancipatory. Steering my reasoning through the historical development of HRE, I contend that the time for Critical Human Rights Education has arrived.

Diversity and Teacher Education

The concept of diversity has been foregrounded in educational discourse, since inequalities, including educational inequalities, are constitutive of and are, in turn constituted by diversities. This is the starting point of the argument in this chapter, en route to presenting new ways of thinking about diversity, social justice, difference and solidarity in the context of teacher education. It takes issue with the ghettoized construction of equality, amidst empirical evidence that indicates that South African society’s deeply embedded prejudices are antithetical to social justice. We thus take the approach that it is more sustainable and desirable to interpret and anchor social justice within a conceptual frame that logically links difference and diversity with the political notion of solidarity, so human agency can be advanced. Derrida’s reworked notions of hospitality, diversity and difference are rearticulated with the political purposes of social justice and solidarity. Applying these constructs to re-examine findings on teacher education, we conclude that teacher education/training should not simply be aimed at managing the expressed or demonstrated diversity in the classroom, but rather at how to engage with diversity as an operative notion for social justice, and solidarity with humanity, and human suffering.

Curriculum Reform in Transitional Justice Environments: The South African Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Education and the Schooling Sector

This chapter explores the role of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), established in 1995, in promoting human rights education within the schooling system in a transitional context. In the South African post-apartheid environment, the widespread discourse on human rights – linked with the new Constitution, legal reforms and compliance with international standards – facilitated a review of the entire education system, including the curriculum, resourcing of schools and bringing the various racially segregated departments together in one education system. We focus our attention in presenting and analyzing the effort to infuse human rights content and values within the curriculum reform efforts as part of the strategy of reconstruction of South African society. In this chapter we will show that there were competing forces influencing curriculum reform, with the SAHRC’s more ambitious goal to have “transformative” HRE infused throughout the curriculum reduced to one that was less ambitious in both scope and depth.