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Date : 29/03/2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: K Asmal: Conference on Human Rights and Democracy Education in the Curriculum


KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, MINISTER OF EDUCATION, AT THE CONFERENCE ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY EDUCATION IN THE CURRICULUM: CHALLENGES AND CONTESTATIONS, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 29 March 2004

INFUSING DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN EDUCATION

Chairperson of the Board of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, Mr Leshele Thoahlane
Members of the Board of Directors
Executive Director, Mr Denis Kadima
Chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, Mr Jody Kollapen
Head of Development at the Development Co-operation Ireland, Mr Justin Carroll
Guests from our SADC partners
Colleagues from the unions, non-governmental organisations, universities and other institutions
Honoured guests
Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is a pleasure to be with you to open this important conference on education, democracy and human rights. To our guests from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, I extend a special welcome. You visit us during an auspicious time as we celebrate our ten years of freedom and democracy in South Africa. As we look back over the past ten years, we can also celebrate advances in regional and continent-wide collaboration through SADC and the African Union (AU).

You also visit us during an election season, as we put our democracy into practice by voting. Speaking today as Minister of Education, I will scrupulously avoid any hint of electioneering. So, if I observe that the African National Congress (ANC) has a long human rights tradition that has provided the foundation over the past ten years for building a culture of human rights in South Africa, I make this observation, not as a politician, but as a legal scholar, historian and teacher.

In my remarks this evening, I want to think with you about human rights by asking three questions: Where do human rights come from? How do we infuse democracy and human rights in education? And where are human rights going in our changing, globalising world?

The Origin of Human Rights

Where do human rights come from? In as recent article published in the Financial Mail, a South African journalist asserted that the idea of human rights came from Europe to Africa along with all of the other "liberal ideals inherited from our former colonists".

This claim is errant nonsense. It is bad history. It is historically inaccurate to assume that liberal ideals, such as human rights, were a product of the West. The notion of human rights is truly universal because it arises whenever and wherever people are oppressed and struggle for liberation.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, all advances in the theory and practice of human rights were produced outside of the West, as the scope of human rights was extended from the liberal definition of human rights as political rights in Western countries to include socio-economic rights, women's rights, children's rights, cultural rights, environmental rights, and other extensions of the principle of basic, inalienable rights.

In the early days of the ANC, our leadership often called attention to liberal ideals of citizenship, democracy, and equality, not because they had "inherited" those ideals from European colonists, but because they saw their colonial masters consistently violating those ideals.

The ANC has a long human rights tradition. In 1943 the first comprehensive formulation of human rights, Africans' Claims in South Africa, anticipated the United Nation's (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 by five years and set the framework for the Women's Charter (1954), the Freedom Charter (1955), and other landmarks in the ANC human rights tradition.

When it came to drafting a Constitution and a Bill of Rights for a democratic South Africa, this human rights tradition bore fruit by establishing democracy, human dignity, equality, and freedom as the basic principles, I would submit, of an authentic liberalism animating our Constitution.

In our efforts to carefully balance individual rights with social justice, we enshrined liberal values in our Constitution, not only the values of equality, dignity, and freedom, but also genuinely liberal provisions for an electoral system of proportional representation to establish multi-party democracy, a Constitutional Court and statutory commissions, including the Human Rights Commission, to protect individual rights. Other liberal provisions of the Constitution include abolishing censorship, renouncing capital punishment, and affirming a woman's right to choose.

Individual property rights, so often celebrated by self-proclaimed liberals, are protected in our Constitution, not because of the efforts of those liberals, but because the ANC defended individual rights against any proposals to entrench group rights, cultural privileges, or ethnic vetoes in our Constitution.

None of these features of our Constitution were "inherited from our former colonists." They grew out of our own worldview. They were the achievements of our liberation movement. Not derived from elsewhere, these ideals were forged in our historical struggles for decolonisation and national liberation.

Accordingly, we do not need to be lectured by "liberals" who claim their legitimacy from our former colonists. They represent a species of liberalism that I call "mutant liberalism," shaped by the peculiar conditions of colonial and apartheid South Africa, in which liberals honed their liberal ideals while they benefited from systematic violations of human liberty.

Of course, this species of mutant liberalism is not only found in South Africa. In our globalising world, we see this version of liberalism in the self-centred and selfish policies of major powers that proclaim individual freedom, but benefit from inequality, social injustice, and global exploitation.

By contrast to this mutant variety, genuine liberalism affirms both individual equality and social justice.

Here our self-defined liberals in South Africa so often seem to betray the best of the political philosophy of liberalism. While championing individual liberty, they neglect the force of social justice that is such a prominent concern for so many of the major theorists of liberalism.

Our Constitution, as President Thabo Mbeki has observed, merges an inclusive vision of African nationalism with the liberal principle of voluntary association because it "rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people". Here we have the basis for an open, inclusive, and genuinely liberal vision of a constitutional democracy.

Values in Education

Democracy can only flourish in an open, inclusive society. Likewise, democratic values, a sense of citizenship, and a culture of human rights can only be created within an open and inclusive education system.

In 1994 we inherited a closed, exclusionary and anti-democratic system of education in South Africa. We were a divided, wounded, and deeply scarred society. Apartheid education contributed enormously to this damage. Christian National Education -which was neither Christian, nor national, nor truly educational - contributed to the militarisation and polarisation of our society. Bantu Education, which was designed to cripple our people, left lingering wounds in our society.

We could not expect that the corrosion of our human dignity would heal quickly and without purposeful effort, active reconciliation and focused attention to developing the values necessary to support our democracy.

During my years as Minister of Education, I have been particularly proud of our efforts to instil values in education. As a committed defender of public education, I have always believed education is a value in its own right, a public good that everyone can enjoy and no one can be denied.

Our Values in Education Initiative has been dedicated to realising that central value of education as a public good. Like diamond, that central value has many different facets. So we have been identifying values, nurturing life skills, addressing racism, revitalising history, promoting multi-lingualism, removing barriers to learning, and understanding the role of religion - all in the interest of making our schools vital centres for the public good.

In our Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy, which was published in 2001, we sought to identify the basic values that we were committed to promoting in education. Our commitment to these values was based on our Constitution, which provides the heart and soul of a society based on "democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights." Drawing on our Constitution, we identified ten values:

Democracy, which is a system of governance, by the "will of the people", is also a value that is only realised in the full and equal participation of all of our people in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Social justice and equity is a value that ensures access not only to political rights but also to the progressive realisation of social and economic rights, as our Constitution prescribes, "to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services".

Equality is a value that ensures fair treatment and freedom from discrimination on the basis of "race, gender, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth".

Non-racism and non-sexism, which have been crucial values throughout our liberation struggle, are now the bedrock of a unified society of freedom from discrimination but also freedom for human flourishing and fulfilment.

Ubuntu, human dignity premised on a deep sense of humanism, is the profound value of human recognition that arises as we discover our humanity, not in the abstract, but in ongoing relations of reciprocal regard with other human beings.

An open society, which is established by our Constitution, is the crucial context in which we realise freedom of conscience, expression, communication, assembly, and association.

Accountability, which puts our responsibility to each other into practice, underpins the social contract in which we prove ourselves worthy of each other's trust.

The rule of law, under the supremacy of the Constitution, is a value realised in the peaceful resolution of competing interests and the protection of people from illegitimate force, coercion or harm.

Respect, which is more profound than the rather tepid, conditional term, "tolerance", is a value cultivated through learning about each other, in all of our diversity of language, culture and religion.

Reconciliation, which is a value mandated by our Constitution, has flowered in South Africa. We can truly say that our national motto- '!ke e: /xarra //ke', "Unity in Diversity" - is not merely a slogan but a reality. The Constitution directly relates reconciliation to transformation, calling upon us to reconcile - to "heal the divisions of the past" - in and through the process of establishing "a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights."

These, then, were the values we identified as flowing directly from our Constitution. This nexus of values is our framework for building and sustaining a culture of human rights in our schools and in our society.

What We Teach, How We Teach

In putting these values into practice, we established four cornerstones of a co-ordinated strategy to "seed" these democratic values in education: critical thinking, creative expression through art, a critical understanding of history, and multilingualism.

Work on instilling these new values is central to our National Curriculum Statement on which we consulted widely.

The National Curriculum Statement adopts four approaches to making values and human rights central features of the education of our children in South Africa. First, the National Curriculum Statement ensured that values and human rights education were infused throughout the curriculum, underpinning every subject. The seriousness with which we took this task was shown in the establishment of a working group on values and human rights, which closely monitored the development of each and every subject or learning area from a values and human rights perspective. No subject or learning area, including Mathematics, Information Technology, Natural Sciences and Accounting, escaped the scrutiny of this working group.

An illustration of this approach is the way in which the subject Geography was conceived in the National Curriculum Statement Grades 10 to 12. The subject focuses on both physical and human geography, and seeks to empower students to be able to make sound judgments that will contribute to equitable and sustainable development of human society and the physical environment. The subject equips and encourages students to challenge social and environmental injustices. Knowing the devastating effects of apartheid geography in the history of South Africa, this approach was the most logical and most appropriate to adopt.

Second, every student from Grade R to Grade 12 is obliged to enrol for a new subject called Life Orientation. One of the central features of Life Orientation is education for citizenship, which differs from the old and boring 'Civics', in that it is not about memorising the names of political figures and learning about the powers of local councillors. Citizenship education is about young people learning basic political literacy, peace education, environmental education, democracy education and anti-discrimination education. This view of citizenship education is premised on the idea that our students should be informed, responsible, critical and active citizens, not mere subjects ready to follow instructions from an omnipotent ruler.

Third, the National Curriculum Statement also requires that arts and culture be a compulsory and examinable learning area in Grades R to 9. This will provide a vehicle for teamwork as well a medium for cross-cultural activity through which students will not only learn about one another's different cultural traditions, but practise them too. It is through such efforts that we can genuinely develop respect for our different cultures, and lay a solid foundation for our unity in diversity.

Fourth, we have put history back in the curriculum in a manner that will ensure that we liberate the people of this country "from our ignorance of what makes up this country and its peoples" and ensure that all the lost voices in our history take their rightful place.

As Milan Kundera advises, "history is the triumph of memory over forgetting". There is nothing more powerful as keeping alive the memory of the injustices visited on our people to ensure that those injustices never, and never again raise their ugly heads in our country and our continent. In this regard, memory is a powerful tool for shaping a future based on human rights, human dignity, freedom, social justice and peace.

In 2000, my department organised a Saamtrek Values Conference, which was held in Cape Town. At that conference, Constitutional Court Judge Kate O'Regan pointed out something we all know, but still should be reminded of, when she said, "The manner in which we teach probably does more to instil values than the subject matter of what we teach." What we do, as teachers, always speaks louder than what we say.

It is crucial, then, that human rights education must be based on what Professor Sir Bernard Crick, emeritus professor of politics at Birkbeck College, London, has called "active" as opposed to "good" human rights. "Active" human rights education is based on action-oriented, "learning through doing" approaches that provide opportunities for young people to experience the lessons of human rights that come from participating in real life issues in their communities. For example, learners can be active in creating a human rights barometer for their neighbourhoods and then organising to address whatever human rights abuses they might find. Or they can be active in volunteering at various community development projects and documenting what they learn.

This active learning of "active" human rights is in keeping with our basic understanding that teaching and learning should be enabling and empowering. Breaking with the educational methods of the past, which were based on rote learning, stuffing our student's heads with "facts", our curriculum enables learners to develop new capacities for critical thinking and creative imagination. In human rights education, as in other areas of the curriculum, this liberating approach to how we teach and learn is crucial.

The Future of Human Rights

As I come to the end of five years as Minister of Education, I find myself looking back over our accomplishments. I believe that we can take pride in how far we have come, while still being mindful of our continuing challenges.

Tonight, however, instead of just looking back, I want to test our imaginative powers by trying to catch a glimpse of the future of human rights. Our past, of course, is a prologue to that future. If we use our first ten years of freedom and democracy in South Africa as a focusing lens, I think we should be prepared for the possibility that in a short space of time we can move from despair to hope.

Ten years ago, education was a source of our despair. Today, education is a repository of our hope. The future of human rights, as instruments of transformation, must be their capacity to enable us to confront the very things that cause us despair and change them into real grounds for hope.

Today, for many people, globalisation is a source of despair, not because the global movement of money, technology, and people has made the world a "global village", but because these forces have been widening the gap between rich and poor in an increasingly polarised world. How could this source of despair become a repository of hope?

If the notion of human rights has a future, it must be in harnessing global forces to a politics of hope. Advancing a powerful critique, while never giving up hope, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has argued that we must "ask questions not only about the economics and politics of globalisation, but also about the values and ethics that shape our conception of the global world."

When I chaired the World Commission on Dams, we worked out an approach to decision-making in development projects that I called "globalisation from below". Within a human rights framework, this approach considered the rights and risks of global investors but it insisted on highlighting the human rights, as well as the considerable risks, of people who were most directly affected by the project. As we brought peasants, workers, women's groups and representatives of indigenous people into the negotiations, we saw the tremendous potential of grassroots globalisation for advancing human rights in transnational negotiations.

In education, I believe the future of human rights will also depend upon "globalisation from below". This will involve reaffirming our commitment to education as a basic human right. But it will also entail redefining education as a public good in a globalising world. Resisting attempts to turn education into a commodity to be bought and sold on the global market, we must reclaim the principle of the "public good".

By definition, a "public good" is a value that in principle anyone can share and in practice no one can be denied.

Economists have technical terms for these features of a public good. As a value that anyone can share, a public good is a "non-rivalrous" value; as a value that no one can be denied, a public good is a "non-excludable" value.

We might just want to say that a public good is just another language for human rights. But it is a language that directly engages the global economy as an alternative to the commodification of all values. As such, our commitment to the public good goes to the heart of Amartya Sen's call to clarify "the values and ethics that shape our conception of the global world."

In the future of human rights, revitalising our conception of the public good-as a basis for national sovereignty, public service, and public education-holds the promise of transforming our despair into hope in a globalising world.

Today, for many people, religious difference is a source of despair. As a basis for misunderstanding, as a pretext for intolerance, and as a flashpoint for conflict-religion is often perceived as a problem in our globalising world.

Ten years ago, we inherited an educational system in South Africa that had established a certain kind of Christian religious education in our schools. Under Christian National Education, all teaching and learning was supposed to be infused with a specifically religious character. But religious education and religious instruction in the old regime were special subjects for inculcating certain religious doctrines.

According to one teaching manual, which was re-published as recently as 1995, the aim of religious education in South African public schools was for the "devout teacher" to ensure that learners, "through belief in the Holy Trinity," were able "to affirm the Apostles' Creed with sincerity and conviction." Abandoning any pretence of tolerance or respect for difference, the manual asserted bluntly that a "child who follows the Christian faith is more likely to behave in a moral way than a non-Christian or an un-religious child."

In such a formulation, which sought to indoctrinate our students in one religion, while excluding the commitments of so many of our people, religion in our schools was indeed a source of despair. The previous regime violated the basic human-rights principles of freedom for religious conscience and expression and freedom from religious prejudice and discrimination. How do we transform this source of despair into a repository of hope?

In our Policy for Religion and Education, which I launched in Parliament in September last year, we have made a principled distinction between the many religious interests of our country, which are best served by the home, family, and religious community, and the national public interest in teaching and learning about religion, religions, and religious diversity in our schools.

South Africa's new educational policy for teaching and learning about religion is inclusive, enabling learners to explore their own identities within the diversity of South Africa. Departing from the compulsory Calvinist religious indoctrination of the apartheid era, the new policy proposes educational outcomes in teaching and learning about religious diversity that promote empathetic understanding and critical reflection on religious identity and difference.

Our policy is consistent with current international developments in teaching and learning about religion within a human rights framework. Under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the consultative conference on religion in school education that was convened in Madrid during November 2001 embraced the basic distinction between teaching of religion and teaching about religion. The UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief, Professor Abdelfattah Amor, reported that education about religion "should be conceived as a tool to transmit knowledge and values pertaining to all religious trends, in an inclusive way, so that individuals realise their being part of the same community and learn to create their own identity in harmony with identities different from their own."

In these examples, I am trying to suggest that we will find the future of human rights in the midst of the hardest cases. As a transformative agent, human rights will be deployed at their best every time we engage the sources of our despair as avenues for revitalising hope.

All of this, of course, requires great courage and imagination. It also requires education that is truly educational in enabling us-in the words of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats-"to hold in a single thought reality and justice." We know the harsh reality of the lives of so many of our people in southern Africa. Certainly, that is where we must begin in advancing a politics of hope that transforms our sources of despair into resources for advancing human rights.

I thank you all.

Issued by: Ministry of Education
29 March 2004

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