The Biggest Barrier to Rights-Affirming Education and How to Dismantle It.

EVENT DETAILS:

January 24, 2024
07:00 - 08:30 or 17:30 - 19:00 UTC

This session was offered on January 24th (International Day of Education) as part of the Learning Planet Festival 2024.

Here is the recording of the session:

In using the recording;

  1. The session was offered twice and the recording is an amalgamation of both sessions (Presentation + Dialogue from Session 1 + Dialogue from Session 2).
  2. There were pauses in the original session for participants to respond to prompts; to make the recording easier to access, these pauses have been edited out – if you wish to answer the prompts, please pause the video
  3. It may be interesting to follow the recording and engage with the prompts as a group, so you can dialogue about your responses vs. what we presented.

If you wish to engage with the authors, you may do so via email (sifaan@kinder.lk and Jeanna.l.clements@gmail.com, or on LinkedIn or Facebook

The following is the text used in promoting the event:

There is much work that needs to happen for Education to be Rights-Respecting and Rights-Affirming, as highlighted by the 2022 Youth Declaration on Transforming Education, the 2021 UNESCO Reimagining Our Futures Together, UNICEF’s Child Rights Education Toolkit, the reports of the UN SR on the Right to Education, The Convention on the Rights of the Child (and its General Comments), etc.

But in all their attempts to transform education, they do not question the fundamental assumption in education that is actually the biggest barrier to Rights-Affirming education: Paternalism.

That is why adults, even if they “listen” to what children have to say, believe it is their prerogative to make the final decisions on the education of children.

Is Education without Paternalism possible? Yes, it has been done in many different parts of the world, in some cases for over a century, under different names (Democratic Schools, Unschooling, Sudbury Schools, Agile Learning Centers, Free Schools, etc) and this session will showcase what education looks like when children are respected as full human beings.

On the International Day of Education (Jan 24th) we are organizing two events (for audiences in different time zones) at the Learning Planet Festival as follows:

While you are welcome to directly join the webinar (prior registration is not required), we invite you to confirm your participation on Facebook or LinkedIn for pre/post-session engagement and ease of inviting your contacts on those platforms to join.