Dr Stephen Hopgood, How well do you think our national curriculum covers human rights education?
Asked by jharnby on Nov 16 2007 8:25:58 AM and supported by 17 members
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Human rights education is done through the citizenship stream in secondary schools. There doesn’t seem to be a significant amount of material on human rights particularly, within that citizenship stream. And also of course it is not clear that citizenship and human rights are necessarily entirely sympathetic with each other at some level.
The idea of human rights is something that in effect overrules or trumps the claims of citizenship sometimes. Asylum seekers coming to Britain would expect to be able to make claims under the covenant on social and economic rights or on civil and political rights, but it is not clear that the state meets those.
Citizenship frequently is, if you like, a kind of pass to special rights. For example welfare rights. Rights that are real - you can go and collect money from the state in this way, but if you don't have citizenship you can't. I think there is a tension there between the value benefits of citizenship, and the human rights claim. And many citizens would think they deserved special rights in relation to non-citizens. Even though the human rights language can’t differentiate between them. The question I would ask on this specifically is - how many British citizens would pass the citizenship test? It asks all sorts of questions about government and British history, and it is not clear to me that many existing citizens would necessarily pass.
So for me the citizenship stream is purely a political thing in order to try and reduce tension amongst people who are sceptical about either Muslim citizens of Britain or newcomers to Britain from Eastern Europe.