Children’s Resistance, Participation and the Scholē: Re-imagining Human Rights Education

Abstract

This paper brings together empirical work with young children in participatory research and a critical theoretical analysis of formal schooling to argue for re-imagining human rights education (HRE) in a turbulent world. Drawing on participative research enquiry in early childhood and primary settings, the paper shows how children understand their UN rights to protection, provision and participation, yet experience these rights unevenly. While children frequently report that their participation rights are curtailed, adults often invoke protection rights to justify restrictions on children’s agency, questioning their credibility, or limiting their involvement in matters affecting them. This structural tension—between safeguarding children and enabling them to act as political subjects—emerges as a defining contradiction within contemporary schooling, in particular.

These insights are placed alongside a critique of the modern school as an ideological state apparatus, where grading, surveillance and age-based organisation reproduce inequalities for both children and teachers. Using Havel’s notion of “ideological excuses” and Tesar’s theorisation of childhood subjectivities, the paper examines children’s strategic compliance, subtle resistance, and moments of solidarity with teachers, as well as the ambivalent outcomes of “counter-school” cultures.

Against calls to depoliticise education, the paper argues for an openly politicised HRE that confronts the realities of domination, agency and intergenerational power. To expand the educational imaginary, the paper advances the ancient Greek concept of the Scholē as a resource for re-envisioning HRE as democratised, playful and non-commodified time for collective inquiry and action. Such spaces, within and beyond school, can nurture critical consciousness, strengthen intergenerational solidarity, and support the realisation of children’s rights—particularly their right to participate—in increasingly unequal societies.