Journal of Human Rights, 8:133–138, 2009

Copyright © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1475-4835 print / 1475-4843 online
DOI: 10.1080/14754830902897189

Education as a Human and a Citizenship Right —

Parents’ Rights, Children’s Rights, or. . . ? The
Necessity of Historical Contextualization

TOMAS ENGLUND, ANN QUENNERSTEDT,

AND NINNI WAHLSTRÖM

This paper serves as an introduction to the three following papers by Roth, Wahlström,
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and Quennerstedt, analyzing the contextual background to the different treaties—the

United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on
Human Rights, and the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child—and
focusing on how the relations between parents’ rights and children’s rights in the matter
of education were shaped during the various drafting stages. The paper forms part of a
project that intends to study the meaning and consequences of the increased tendency to
view education from a perspective of rights. More specifically, the project aims to focus
on the implications of parental rights and to analyze potential contradictions between
parents’ and children’s rights in education.

Education as a citizenship right has become a crucial issue in the restructuring of

Western democracies’ school systems. The growing tendency to view and discuss education
through a perspective of rights makes it necessary to consider whose human and citizenship
rights education is expected to meet. In some countries references to certain international
Tomas Englund is a professor of education in the Department of Education, Örebro University,
SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden. His research interests center on curriculum theory and didactics, cur-
riculum history, political socialization and citizenship education, and the philosophy of education.
He directs the research group “Education and Democracy” and is co-editor of the journal with the
same name (in Swedish, Utbildning & Demokrati). He has recently been published in Journal of
Curriculum Studies, Journal of Education Policy, and the Routledge Falmer Reader in Philosophy of
Education.
Ann Quennerstedt is a senior lecturer at the Department of Education, Örebro University, SE-
701 82 Örebro, Sweden. Her areas of interest are educational policy, issues of children’s rights
in education and curriculum studies. Publications include the dissertation Kommunen—en part i
utbildningspolitiken? [The municipality as a participant in educational policy] (2006), two chapters
in Skolan som politisk organisation [The school as a political organization] (Pierre, 2007, ed.), two
chapters in Vadå likvärdighet? [What about equivalence?] (2008), which she also has co-edited with
Tomas Englund, and an article co-authored with Tomas Englund in Journal of Curriculum Studies
(2008).
Ninni Wahlström is a senior lecturer and Assistant Professor at the Department of Education,
Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden. Her areas of interest include philosophy of education,
curriculum research, and educational policy. She has recently had a chapter published in Utbildning
som kommunikation [Education as communication], edited by Tomas Englund, and two chapters in
Vadå likvärdighet? [What about equivalence?], edited by Tomas Englund and Ann Quennerstedt.
Other articles have been accepted for publication in the journals Educational Philosophy and Theory
and Journal of Curriculum Studies.
Address correspondence to Tomas Englund, Professor, Department of Education, Örebro Uni-
versity, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden. Tel: +46-19-303073. E-mail: tomas.englund@oru.se

133
 134 Tomas Englund et al.

treaties on human rights, like the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the European Convention on Human Rights, have been central in strengthening parents’
rights to make educational decisions for their children. At the same time, the rights of
children have generally been recognized through the United Nations’ Convention on the
Rights of the Child.1
The right to education was declared a universal human right in these international
treaties; although a certain tension was included in the documents with regard to who
the primary owner of the right to education was perceived to be. In drawing attention to
international conventions on human rights, Bobbio (1990/2000) claims that changes and
expansions within the articles of human rights are not only complicated with regard to
reaching common agreements but also due to the contradictions and underlying tensions
between individual civil rights and social rights. It is noteworthy that the United Nations
makes a distinction between civil and political rights and social, economical, and cultural
rights by dealing with them in two separate documents (International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights [1966] and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
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Rights [1966]). Van Bueren (1998) claims that a difference in status between the two
categories of rights is expressed through these documents. Civil and political rights are
forwarded in a compelling language that calls for immediate implementation, whereas the
language relating to social rights is more cautious, open to interpretation and allows for
a progressive implementation. An example of this is parents’ right to choose their child’s
education according to their own preferences.
Rights have thus been categorized in different ways; the categories demonstrating
how rights have evolved over time. Bobbio (1990/2000) argues that a first generation of
rights was established as a result of the contest against a totalitarian state, while a second
generation of rights—social rights—emerged from political and social change in society.
Basically, individual rights of freedom mean that the state should not interfere, whereas
social rights call for state action. Bobbio argues that these different rights do not run entirely
parallel, because the full realization of an individual’s rights will obstruct the full realization
of his or her social rights, and vice versa.
Bobbio’s description of rights has similarities with Marshall’s (1949/1964) classical
model of the development of citizenship rights, which states that the first category of rights
to emerge—civil rights—was aimed at protecting the individual from state interference
by making freedom of speech, conscience and religion, along with the right to ownership
and legal justice, important elements of the right to individual freedom. The next category,
political rights, acknowledged each person’s right to participate in the exercising of po-
litical power. The final category in Marshall’s scheme of citizenship rights, social rights,
recognizes that access to a certain degree of economic welfare and security is a right, as is
leading life as a civilized human being. Thus, if civil rights protect the individual from an
interfering state, social rights have quite a different function. In order to fulfil a citizen’s
social rights the state has to act by distributing societal goods and structuring the welfare
state. In other words, social rights are attained by and through the state’s involvement in the
lives of its citizens. However, the expansion of rights described and analyzed by Marshall
(1949/1964) and Bobbio (1990/2000) is primarily valid for adults. Hart and Pavlovic (1991)
argue that when it comes to children, rights have developed quite differently. For adults,
the first rights served to guarantee personal freedom and to acknowledge the individual as
sovereign, while the rights of protection, support, and development were only introduced
after the establishment of these initial rights. For children it is the other way around. The
pronouncement of the child’s right to protection and welfare was made well before claims
for individual freedom and self-determination.
 Education as a Human and a Citizenship Right 135

Marshall (1949/1964) points to educational institutions as being specifically important

for the distribution and upholding of social rights and where education as a social citizenship
right is seen as a central prerequisite for the exercise of one’s civil and political rights:

Fundamentally it should be regarded, not as a right of the child to go to school,

but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated. And there is here no
conflict with civil rights as interpreted in an age of individualism . . . . Education
is a necessary prerequisite of civil freedom. (Marshall 1949/1964: 81)

According to Marshall, the right to education is the child’s right to be educated in

order to be in a position to make use of his/her civil right as an adult. In terms of education,
does this mean that a social right is a rather uncomplicated prerequisite of civil rights?
Marshall (1949/1964) shows how the notion of citizenship rights has developed over time,
at first only including civil rights and later incorporating political and social rights into a
“universal” idea of what it means to be a citizen. As mentioned earlier, Norberto Bobbio
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(1990/2000) emphasizes that rights have been established step by step. Furthermore, also
indicated at the beginning and with the historical development of England as background,
there isn’t always a clear distinction between the particular citizenship rights analyzed by
Marshall and universal human rights and their relationship to natural rights. But whose
right is the right to education? The right of the child to receive education in order to develop
its personality to the full has been expressed alongside with the right of parents to guide
their children and to choose the kind of education to be provided. Even though in general
there is no inconsistency between the rights of children and those of their parents, in some
aspects of education conflicts might emerge that bring potential contradictions to the fore
in relation to both parties’ rights. Although the right to education is categorized as a social
right, it has been argued that education not only promotes other social rights but is also a
means of achieving both civil and political rights. As education is crucial to the forming of
free conscience, making free decisions, and gaining the competence necessary for political
participation, it can therefore be seen as a social right in itself, as well as upholding civil
and political rights (Grover 2006).
In a critical and supplementary perspective on citizenship rights (in relation to the
scheme developed by Marshall), Jürgen Habermas (1992/1996) points out that communica-
tive rights are central to political participation. Thus, Western democracies’ development of
a compulsory comprehensive school system as a collective social right can be said to follow
Marshall’s scheme with tendencies along the lines of the model put forward by Habermas,
in which the educational system can be seen as crucial to the development of the com-
municative rights central to political participation. This development is also well argued
by Gutmann (1987) and Gutmann and Thompson (1996) when they stress the democratic
purpose of education:

Schools should aim to develop their students’ capacities to understand different

perspectives, communicate their understandings to other people, and engage in
the give-and-take of moral argument with a view to making mutually acceptable
decisions. (Gutmann and Thompson 1996: 359)2

In recent decades, however, this development has been challenged by the movement
in favor of reform, and its perspective of education as a parental civil right has been
regarded as central. This also shows that Marshall’s evolutionary model of citizenship
rights development can be questioned. Anthony Giddens (1982, cf. Englund 1994) has
 136 Tomas Englund et al.

done this by focusing on Marshall’s unproblematic view of the state as an evolutionary

force. Giddens highlights that citizenship rights have emerged and expanded through a
process of continual and constant societal struggle—a struggle where rights are contested
and the real substance of these rights changes over time. Building on Giddens’ elaboration
of the Marshallian scheme, the set of citizenship rights that forms the components of
modern citizenship can be viewed as having been socially constructed in societal struggle.
Serious tensions between the different rights can develop. MacPherson (1985) points to this
by emphasizing the differences between civil and social rights and argues that civil rights
exist as rights against the state, while social rights are claims for benefits guaranteed by the
state. Consequently, the nature of social rights means that they are necessarily vulnerable.
Unlike civil and political rights, social rights require certain distributional activities on the
part of the state.
If we take Sweden as an example it is quite clear that in the last 20 years parents have
been awarded more power and influence in the way the education system has become more
accountable to parents, meaning that education has increasingly been looked upon as a civil
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right for parents to decide on the education of their children; a civil right that can be regarded
as situated in a field of force related to the historical construction of education as a social
right. This stronger emphasis on parental rights has been expressed in different ways, e.g.,
by stressing parental involvement in and influence on school activities, by parents’ choice of
schools, by giving parents opportunities to establish independent schools based on religious
or philosophical beliefs, etc. The meaning of education as a human and citizenship right has
thereby become crucial in terms of which kind of citizenship right—civil or social—will
have the most impact on how we think of education as a citizenship right (cf. Englund
1994). In Sweden, the different conventions and claims of rights put forward have had
considerable influence on educational policy and the restructuring of the school system.
Although in many respects this is closely connected with Swedish history, it also raises
the question as to how universally oriented conventions and claims of particular citizenship
rights can and should be understood. As a first step, and by means of the following
three papers, we suggest that an examination of the contextual framework in which these
conventions took shape is vital. Such an analysis would then facilitate a discussion about
the significance of international conventions as authoritative voices with universal claims
and the relation between parents’ rights and children’s rights in contemporary national and
international educational policies. In this second step3 we intend to specifically refer to the
possibilities of what Seyla Benhabib (2004, 2006) calls “democratic iterations,” which she
perceives as involving a “jurisgenerative politics” that mediates “between universal norms
and the will of democratic majorities” (Benhabib 2006: 49).
We therefore suggest that in an attempt to better understand the inner, potential contra-
dictions within and between the articles in the treaties relating to the right to education, we
first of all have to go back to and investigate the drafting process of the different declarations
and conventions. A thorough analysis of the motives that have given rise to the formulations
decided upon and the discussions surrounding the construction of articles on education will
enable us to learn more about the significance of the inherent tension between the rights of
the child and the rights of parents at the time the treaties in question were written. With a
main reference to the analyses made by Marshall and Bobbio, the intention is to examine
the possible connections and tensions between civil rights and social rights in the case of
the right to education.
The following three papers, written by Klas Roth, Ninni Wahlström, and Ann
Quennerstedt, address these proposed analyses of the contextual background to the different
treaties—the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European
 Education as a Human and a Citizenship Right 137

Convention on Human Rights, and the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the
Child—and how the relation between parents’ rights and children’s rights was shaped
during the drafting process.4

Notes
1. In the following our intention is not to analyze the different uses of human rights and citizenship
rights but rather to stress and look at human rights as a broader concept, often contextualized
as referring to all or most human beings, and citizenship rights as referred to a relationship
between citizens and an actual state. However, it is noticeable that history discourses on human
rights always contain relations to ongoing discourses on citizenship rights. In general, discourses
on human rights, with their historical legacy and relationship to natural rights, aim to include
every human being and regard human rights as universal, whereas citizenship rights, with their
relationship to specific states, are particular, even though they can be regarded and rhetorically
used as “universal.”
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2. Ten years prior to this Amy Gutmann warned that “as more and more parents pull their children
out of public schools, public schools will be increasingly incapable of fulfilling their democratic
purposes” (Gutmann 1987: 116).
3. Although this analysis has not been realized at the time of writing it is planned within the
framework of project (cf. note 4). While specific reference will be made to developments in
Sweden it will also include a comparative perspective.
4. The three papers presented here form part of a research project in progress: “Education as
a citizenship right—parental rights, children’s rights, or. . . ?” The project is financed by the
Swedish Research Council and is carried out by researchers from the Department of Education,
Örebro University, Sweden. In general terms the project intends to study the meaning and
consequences of the increased tendency to view education from a perspective of rights. More
specifically, the project aims to focus on the implications of parental rights and to analyze
potential contradictions between parents’ and children’s rights in education.

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