From Global to Local: Integrating the UN Human Rights Education and Training Values into French Educational Reforms

• In Event: Exploring global culture in national contexts: Implications for educational policy and practice

Abstract

Through a content analysis of diverse policy documents, this research paper explores how international policies and conventions are negotiated at the local level. The focus of this paper is to investigate how the French Ministry of National Education (MoNE) integrated the UN Human Rights Education and Training values within their 2013 educational reform, following the government’s vote for an education sector plan expected to foster inclusion and greater social justice. Through this plan, MoNE has made considerable efforts to transform formal education: educational success or failure is no longer expected to depend on individuals but is instead recognized as mainly dependant on an environment that is socially constructed. Hence, this is an opportunity to increase efforts to ensure that vulnerable students have a space to learn about human rights and fully experience them.
The results of the analysis will show, however, that strategies to reach these objectives are questionable, notably from the perspective of marginalized groups. Vulnerable groups in France—identified by the Council of Europe as Roma, “immigrants”, asylum seekers, religious minorities, LGBTI communities, and disabled children and youth—could benefit from structural reforms. But French Civic Education remains tied extensively to values of nationalism and assimilation that do not promote cultural diversity. And groups like LGBTI communities, Roma children, asylum seekers and mentally disabled children remain invisible, reinforcing their lack of inclusion in the educational system, and society.
To ensure that French educational reform is aligned to Human Rights Education and Training values, three steps need to be taken to implement the values of human rights in the formal education system: 1. Reimagine education with a cosmopolitan vision, respecting diversity and aligned to the UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training; 2. Encourage intercultural education, which will require a complete cultural change within schools; 3. Revisit policy documents to ensure their language is inclusive of all groups. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research to understand the key challenges for inclusion in today’s French educational system.

Author

• Emeline Brylinski, Teachers College, Columbia University