[Radix] Re: Chinese experts involved in international school safety guideline creation???

[George Kent]

Ben, with your (and everyone's) indulgence, I would like to expand on  
the two paragraphs of yours that are copied at the bottom of this email.

Those comments of yours responded to my saying:


". . . it is possible to imagine laws that say people are legally  
entitled to safe schools for their children. Ordinary  [people] could  
be given assistance in making their own assessments of the quality of  
schools, and they could be given means through which to submit  
complaints when they believe the standards are not met.

This rights-based approach should be linked to efforts to increase  
transparency. There should be clear standards for construction, and  
the general public should be informed about these standards, in ways  
that are appropriate for non-experts."


I was not clear enough when I said that. In my work on rights, I am  
now making a sharp distinction between rights-based social systems in  
general, as a generic concept, and the particular concrete  
manifestation of that form in the current international human rights  
system. Generically, rights-based social systems are any systems that  
involve some people having rights, other people having corresponding  
obligations to ensure that those rights are realized, and  
institutional arrangements for accountability to make sure those who  
have the obligations do what they are supposed to do. One can have  
such systems in schools, prisons, hospital, villages, etc. The rights  
can be drawn from any source.

Having made this distinction, we should not assume that all  
conversations about rights are about the  the HUMAN rights system that  
is managed through the United Nations.

On this basis, I am exploring the idea that national (and other)  
governments might see that they could use home-grown rights-based  
systems to help meet their own goals. In our China example, this could  
be a way of drawing the general public into a system for holding  
builders and others accountable. Civil society could be part of the  
process by which government fights corruption. That system and the  
standards used need not have any relationship to those set up at the  
global level. With this approach, the rights system becomes an asset  
for the government, and would not be viewed as a burden imposed on it.

The idea here is to shift from viewing rights mainly in terms of a  
national government’s obligations to submit to outsiders’ standards to  
instead seeing a system of rights as a tool through which national  
governments can pursue their own goals more effectively. The point is  
not to submit to outsiders’ standards for school architecture, but to  
set your own, and to get ordinary people to understand that they have  
the right and the means to insist that those standards are met.
I was glad to hear that there are some pilot projects that are  
exploring increased community involvement in school safety issues. I  
wonder if this home-grown approach to rights would be useful in them.

Aloha, George



On Jan 30, 2009, at 12:02 PM, bwisner at igc.org wrote:
>
> I have mixed feeling about the use of rights language.  There are so  
> many compelling reasons why children should be safeguarded without  
> reference to an abstraction like "rights of the child" or "human  
> rights."  While I don't personally deny the existence of universal  
> human rights, in some cultural context at particular historical  
> moments it may be easier to get the work of school protection done  
> by reference to cultural injunctions in the Koran, to the economic  
> value of children, etc., etc.
>
> In this discussion that began about China but is now broader, some  
> of use have tended toward taking a more pragmatic approach whilst  
> others have tended to insist on upholding principles.  I suspect  
> despite these tendencies, our views overlap.  As you yourself noted  
> in your experience in working with the Chinese on food quality  
> issues, sometimes it is necessary work horizontally, expert to  
> expert and bracket political philosophical issues.