Aspirations and limits of the human rights education vision in a transitional justice environment: the South Africa case

• In Event: Education Reform for Healing, Co-Existence and Human Rights in Transitional Justice Environments

Abstract

Drs. Keet and Tibbitts will provide a join presentation on the efforts of the South African Human Rights Commission to promote human rights education within the schooling system. In the South African post-apartheid environment, the widespread discourse on human rights – linked with the new Constitution, legal reforms, and the globalization of human rights education – facilitated a review of the entire curriculum, as well as other schooling practices such as segregation and resourcing of schools. They will present and analyze the effort to infuse human rights content and values within the curriculum reform efforts of that period, based on document and literature reviews, key stakeholder interviews and reflective inquiry.

Dr. Andre Keet is former Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the SAHRC and one of the key staff people at the Commission responsible for promoting Human Rights Education within the curriculum reform efforts in the immediate post-apartheid era. In the first part of the two-part presentation, he will present in some detail the efforts of the SAHRC in organizing a HRE review of the curriculum reform processes and the associated recommendations. His presentation will include HRE curriculum review strategies that are especially rare and may be of interest for other national environments. Dr. Keet will conclude his presentation with an update on the status of HRE in the country and highlight potential lessons for other transitional justice environments, given the SA experience.

In the second presentation, Dr. Felisa Tibbitts will present the paradigmatic context of the South African transitional justice environment and key antecedents to the SA HRE curriculum reform effort, including civil society initiatives and equity-oriented curriculum reform in the final apartheid period. Dr. Tibbitts will analyze the conditions seem to have either facilitated or impeded the HRE in SA, drawing on the South Africa case as well as curriculum reform efforts in other transitional justice environments. She argues that the South Africa case study illustrates both the influences and limitations of human rights values as a reform strategy emanating from the globalization of HRE. The South Africa case also reveals the ‘messy complexity’ of an educational system having to navigate the past and prepare for the future, while balancing disparate views of human development – one oriented towards a vision of social co-existence and justice and the other on economic security.

The presentation will draw on an analytical chapter developed for a research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Author

• Felisa Tibbitts, Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State (South Africa)