The International Day for the Rights of the Child is celebrated each year on November 20th. On this date the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1959, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.
The first Declaration on the Rights of the Child, commonly called the Geneva Declaration, was adopted by the now defunct League of Nations in 1924. This text, first proclaimed a year earlier by the International Union for the Relief of Children, was essentially focused on the protection of childhood.
A little more than ten years passed between the first registration of the project of the Convention, by Poland in 1978, and its adoption on November 20th 1989. The Polish gesture witnessed to the recognition of the work of the educator and paediatrician Janusz Korczak, who had affirmed the special rights of children since the 1920’s, and who had demanded recognition of these rights by the League of Nations.
As we will recall, the adoption of this Convention resulted in a sort of balancing act regarding children’s rights, between civil and political rights on the one hand and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. The first concerns children’s rights to freedom of expression and participation, while the second is more centred on protecting children and preventing the dangers they can encounter, particularly as a result of their “vulnerable situation”, to use the term employed by the United Nations.
Nevertheless, civil and political rights do not operate on the same level as economic, social and cultural rights, even if one agrees that the two kinds of rights are inseparable. Participation is unthinkable outside of the educational process that accompanies it, affirms Philippe Meirieu . Which is clearly not the case, he makes clear, for protection and prevention. These are applied “from outside” the children: Meireu makes clear that they are “objects” of protection and prevention, but “subjects” in the area of participation, while underlining that it is this third area which is questionable. He believes it is by this means that the Convention arrives at the heart of the educational question, which is the difficult distinction between the necessary exercise of adult authority and the indispensable freedom of the child. As Beranger and Pain note, if the authority allows the acquisition of knowledge, its aim is also to encourage the autonomy of the subject. In other words, and to use the Comenius’s words, the authority of the educator is the help which he owes the child to become who he must be, which the pedagogue clearly distinguishes from the harshness of teachers who “tend to make pupils servile”.
These words invite us to evaluate the achievement of the right to education not only in terms of access to teaching but equally to the quality of teaching given to children.
Célestin Freinet does not hesitate to describe the education given to children in her time as the " pedagogy of the staircase ", that is to say that it consisted in having the students climb the stairs step by step, their heads lowered. From what we know, numerous children today are subjected to authoritarian educational practices, botched evaluations and corporal punishment. Teaching content also contains persistent educational discrimination, lathered with sexist stereotypes and nationalistic exaltations. To these very real problems can be added the unequal formation of some 60 million teachers in the world and the effects of this on the quality of education provided .
Quality is evaluated equally in the light of required competences. Even in developed countries, where the level of schooling attained for primary and secondary education is almost 100%, 15-20% of students leave school without the basic competencies that would permit them to find a job, even without counting those who abandon school before the end of compulsory education. As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said, these people become good candidates for social exclusion.
Compulsory education must be seen in the perspective of the quality of the content of education and of the willingness to assure education for all in the world by 2015.
