WERA IRN Human Rights Education 2022 Webinar Series Seminar 3

Human rights education as a framework for transmitting religion as cultural heritage

Eva Lindhardt, University College Copenhagen, Denmark

The child’s right to freedom of religion and belief and fundamental principles such as equality and non-discrimination constitute an international frame for religious education (RE). However, these rights risk being undermined when RE is allocated a major role in transmitting the majority religion as national cultural heritage and national identity. In this presentation Eva Lindhardt will explore and discuss this question. She will draw on her analysis of the transmission of Christianity as cultural heritage in the national RE curriculum for primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark. She argues that human rights education principles could provide a basis for an alternative pluralistic, objective, and critical approach to RE, thus enabling the classroom to function as a community of disagreement. The author’s full paper is Lindhardt, E. (2022). Human rights education as a framework for transmitting religion as cultural heritage. Human Rights Education Review, 5(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.4452

It can be read at https://humanrer.org/index.php/human/article/view/4452

A recording will feature on the HRER YouTube Channel after the event. Past webinars can also be found there.

ALL WELCOME

About the organizers

The WERA IRN on Human Rights Education was established in Spring 2019 and launched in London in June that year. The coordinators are Professor Audrey Osler (USN, Norway, University of Leeds, UK ) and Professor Hugh Starkey (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, London, UK). The two pillars of the IRN are Human Rights Education Review and UCL’s International Conference on Education and Democratic Citizenship (ICEDC) conference.