Child Rights: The Movement, International Law, and Opposition

1 Children’s Rights: An Historical and Conceptual Analysis

13 D d One Children’s Rights: An Historical and Conceptual Analysis Clark Butler The Child Rights Convention in the Light of Two Movements for the Rights of the Child There was a time, exemplified by early Roman law, when children were considered property of the family father, who had a life-and-death power over them. This was no longer the case by the time of the French Enlightenment. Yet the enthusiastic reception given to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) considered his most important work, Emile,1 was nothing less than the discovery of preschool childhood by the reading public of Europe in the eighteenth century. This was an important and lasting discovery. Before Rousseau, children were often viewed within the upper classes as little adults, and were dressed accordingly , but not allowed the freedom to express themselves as adults. The child rights movement, which Rousseau founded, soon spread to the German speaking world, and eventually to the English speaking world, through writers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1776-1827),2 Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852),3 and Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894)4 —child rights activists to whom we owe kindergarten. The peculiarity of Rousseau’s child rights movement was that it proclaimed the essential goodness and innocence of preschool children. Quite legitimately, it promoted the right of such children to be children, to play and explore and not merely to be seen and not heard. Yet it also aspired to perpetuate childhood as a model of virtue for children into the school years and even 14 clark butler into adulthood. Children were virtuous, and adults were corrupt and degenerate , unless they preserved something of the innocence of the child. Rousseau initiated a kind of children’s liberation movement. However, it was not a movement to liberate children from childhood and to enable them to exercise, even as children, adult human rights, like the right to work, as advocated in recent decades by some child liberationists.5 Rousseau’s aim was precisely to liberate children from the exercise of such adult human rights. His aim is reflected in article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which declares the child’s right to leisure and to learning by play. This Rousseauean child rights movement, however, is not the only one that has come to fruition in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. What is most striking about the convention, what goes beyond the 1959 UN Declaration of Children’s rights is, I suggest, the result of a very different children’s rights movement—one upheld, for example, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) in express opposition to Rousseau. This essay will defend the neohumanist concept of children’s rights more commonly associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), but to which Hegel also subscribed. Hegel did not write extensively on children’s rights.6 Yet what he does say, developed in close association with his particular philosophy of education, points to respect for a basic right of the child to education in dialogical skills for adulthood, and not merely as an end in itself to be enjoyed by children in deliberating and deciding their own life conditions as children. This is a right that does not depend merely on our universal compassion for the millions of children who continue to suffer in this world due to insecurity and a lack of life’s necessities. Children consciously suffer from starvation. But they may not consciously suffer from violation of their basic right to nonvocational education, which their rights to security and subsistence of course serve to support. Children already appreciate that basic right to the extent that they want to be the equals of adults, but they will fully appreciate it only when they are no longer children. That there is a “basic” human right may seem to contradict United Nations documents that consistently deny a hierarchy in such rights and hold all such rights to be not only interrelated but indivisible. But we avoid affirming a basic adult human right in the sense of a right which appears at the top of a hierarchy of rights. It can be argued that there is only one adult human right (freedom of expression in dialogue) which “other” rights serve to support. In other words, they are the same universal right under different particular descriptions. Thus, the right to freedom of expression is under one description that very right under the more particular...