A/HRC/47/32
United Nations
General Assembly
Distr.: General
16 April 2021
English
Original: French
Human Rights Council
Forty-seventh session
21 June–9 July 2021
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights,
civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights,
including the right to development
Right to education: the cultural dimensions of the right to
education, or the right to education as a cultural right
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Koumbou
Boly Barry
Summary
In the present report, submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolutions 8/4
and 44/3, the Special Rapporteur on the right to education considers the cultural dimensions
of the right to education, which are crucial to ensuring that the universal right to inclusive
and quality education is realized, as called for in Sustainable Development Goal 4.
In her analysis, the Special Rapporteur draws on experiences at the national level to
identify factors conducive to ensuring respect for diversity and the cultural rights of everyone
in education, including:
(a)
Making the most of cultural resources;
(b)
Participation in educational life of all relevant actors, including learners in all
their diversity;
(c)
Decentralization in favour of local actors and the granting of a degree of
autonomy for schools to ensure the cultural relevance of their teaching;
(d)
Participatory and holistic observation methods;
(e)
Respect for freedoms in the field of education.
The Special Rapporteur calls for the right to education to be viewed as a cultural right
– that is, as the right of each person to the cultural resources necessary to freely follow a
process of identification, to experience mutually rewarding relations his or her life long, to
deal with the crucial challenges facing our world and to engage in the practices that make it
possible to take ownership of and contribute to these resources.
What is unique about this approach is its conception of educational life as a living
relationship between actors (students, educators, organizations and other associated actors)
and collections of knowledge that form shared cultural resources, vectors of identity, values
and meaning, without which action is impossible.
GE.21-05085 (E)
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