Quick Introduction

The United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1989 was a watershed moment in the history of Human Rights – for the first time, Children were recognized as Human Beings who are the Subject of their own Rights.

Wait...So, weren’t children considered Human Beings before 1989? It depends on what we mean by “Human Beings”; if we mean “members of the species Homo Sapiens”, then, yes, they were human beings. But if we mean people worthy of being “treated with dignity, and possessing Human Rights”, then they were not.

As an analogy, when the US Declaration of Independence asserted “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” they implicity excluded slaves from “all men” – because slaves were property. (Women were also property and were also excluded, but that was more explicit because they literally wrote “men”.)

The practices of education and childcare (in both domestic and institutional settings, and especially mass public education) were developed when children were property. While these practices have been somewhat modulated by other conceptualizations (e.g. children as cherubs, children as objects of charity, even children as active agents), they have not been overhauled in the light of the CRC. Here are some examples of how mainstream educational / childcare practice is not aligned with Child Rights.

This has not gone completely unnoticed – for example, the UN General Assembly, approved in 2005 a proposal for a “a rights-based quality assurance system (including school self-evaluation and development planning, school inspection, etc.) for education in general”.

Unfortunately, the status quo has so much inertia, and moreover there are other forces (such as the Teacher-centric vs Learner-centric distraction , and the influence of Human Capital Theory of Education) acting against a Human Rights-Based Approach, that nothing happened with this proposal. Until now.

We are building this “rights-based quality assurance system” as a voluntary reporting framework (called Rights-Centric Education, to highlight that it is Human Rights, not the Teacher, nor the Learner, who should be centered in education) applicable for all educational contexts – so just like member states that ratify a treaty participate in periodical reviews, educational environments that join the Alliance for Rights-Centric Education commit to report periodically on their progress in overhauling educational practice to respect, protect and fulfil the Rights of the Child.

And everyone is welcome to sign a declaration supporting this overhaul.