“The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte

We have spent the entire INTL 399 course discussing education policy, the need for governments to educate better, and the benefits thereof. Let me argue that all of this, all of these “better education policies” and “rights to education” that people “have”, is completely separate from “reality”.

The Right to Education project extolls the work of multiple international and non-governmental organizations that work towards furthering education policies because education is “a right in itself”[1]. “Hurrah!” they say as their belief gains international prominence and becomes normal in the minds of any “educated, pluralist fellow”.

Those scare quotes challenge the assumption that because the majority of people believe something, it must be true.

I personally buy into the scheme of globalized education, and as I am writing now from a position of privilege in a university setting, I have an obvious bias towards education and academia over working in a sweatshop. Yet I became educated because that is what my culture and worldview told me to do. My worldview tells me that education is the key to personal and economic success, and as such education is just as basic of a right as the right to breath. Denying someone’s intellectual freedom and development is akin to denying someone’s physical freedom and subjectivity.

But Western culture informs my view of the world and argues for the fundamentality of formalized education to personal development.

Attempting to abstract human rights out from under the oppression of our own cultures, what can we really say about them? In order for there to be rights, it must be assumed that someone is giving people these rights, for one can only have rights if there is something granting these rights and someone who does not have them. If you believe in God, there you go: big, bearded man going around creating life and endowing everyone with “the right to a primary school education and a Christmas holiday”. Fine. Yet for those who do not ascribe to a divine, who is granting us these rights?

Rights as such, while I support them fully, are just as relative as whether or not you think a bird feeder is either at rest or hurtling through space. The bird feeder is doing both of these contradictory things, and the answer one gives depends on their frame of reference[2].

The conception of the universality of rights comes from a specific worldview that purports their existence.

Thus projects like the Right to Education are troublesome because they claim to have a sort of divine knowledge into the workings of the world when they are really just the beliefs of one worldview asserting their ideas upon everyone else.

Human rights are relative to their cultural context, and the concept of education is not above and beyond culturally-informed paradigms of what a person is and what rights they do and do not have.