“The path of social justice”: A Human Rights History of Social Justice Education

Abstract

Although not often recognized, social justice education in the U.S. is historically and philosophically tied to the twentieth century's human rights initiatives. The efforts of human rights pioneers, such as those who authored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have indelibly shaped social justice efforts, including within education, in the U.S. Reframing social justice education in light of human rights gives clarity to and concretizes our work as social justice educators: It strengthens a vision of education as central to promoting rights and justice; it refocuses attention on a broader array of fundamental rights, and it explicitly contests our globalized and neoliberal context, a context heavily influencing educational reform.

Acknowledgments

This article is adapted from an earlier version (Grant & Gibson, 2010)

Notes

1. These are references to a variety of political and social movements occurring from 2010–2012. The Arab Spring refers to the series of uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the Winter of 2010 and the Spring of 2011, beginning with the successful overthrow of the Tunisian government and including the Egyptian protests and ejection of President Hosni Mubarak. These uprisings were largely demands for increased democratic participation and less authoritarian rule. The Occupy Movement, which speaks out against social and economic inequality, was a protest movement inspired in part by the Arab Spring. Beginning in North America in 2011—with the best-known protest occurring in New York City's Zuccotti Park—it subsequently spread all over the world. Save Our Schools was another protest movement in 2011 and 2012 speaking out against educational inequality in the US and organizing against the neoliberal reform policies of local cities and the Obama administration.

2. While we are focusing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), two human rights documents were written and ratified at the UN from 1945–1948: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the UDHR. The UDHR was intentionally written as a statement of general human rights aims without reference to enforcement; its supplemental, legally binding treaties on human rights—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—were written in1966 (Glendon, 2001).

3. Concurrent to the Human Rights Commission's work on drafting the UDHR, the United Nations Educational and Scientific Committee (UNESCO) set about surveying philosophers, politicians, scholars, scientists, and educators the world over in order to determine if there were such a thing as universal human rights. UNESCO collected its responses and submitted them to the Human Rights Commission as evidence of and guidance for universal human rights as well as a warning about the limits of crafting a universal declaration. While the HRC did not use UNESCO's survey, most of UNESCO's findings correspond to the UDHR (Glendon, 2001; UNESCO, 1949).

4. While sexual minorities are outspoken advocates for social justice in contemporary society and while they often figure in a listing of marginalized and oppressed identities, it is important to note that LGBTQ individuals were not explicitly included in the original concern for human rights or in the UN's codification of human rights.

5. Of course, aligning social/economic rights and civil/political rights along Cold War ideologies is a gross over-simplification, particularly its conflation of socialism and communism. As pointed out, dignitarian rights have long been associated with socialist societies—social democracies in Scandinavia, Latin America, and Europe. Socialism is an economic system built on cooperative management of the economy, as opposed to an economy of unregulated free markets. There is a vast range of what this can look like in practice. Communism is one extreme—a frequently totalitarian political and economic system with an ideal of a classless and stateless society. A socialist economy is compatible with a democratic political system; communism is not.

6. We are primarily concerned with globalization as the process of “increased economic, cultural, environmental, and social interdependencies and new transnational financial and political formation arising out of the mobility of capital, labor and information, with both homogenizing and differentiating tendencies” (Blackmore, 1999, p. 33). It is characterized by the growing international centrality of capital markets and by the reframing of “all social relations, all forms of knowledge and culture in terms of the market,” with “[a]ll human production and all sites of social intercourse, all services that a society establishes for the common good … potential targets for investment and profit making” (Lipman, 2001, para. 33). However, we recognize that there are, in fact, multiple globalizations. In all of them, we see two trends: Increased inequality and increased possibility for trans-national social protest.