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13 - Education, Income Inequality and the Right to Participate in Cultural Life

from Part III - Socioeconomic Rights and Economic Inequalities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2021

By
James Murphy
Edited by
Gillian MacNaughton ,
Diane Frey  and
Catherine Porter
Gillian MacNaughton
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Diane Frey
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
Catherine Porter
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
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Summary

Anton Chekhov said that art “prepares us for tenderness” (Saunders 2004). Taking the idea a step further, Martha Nussbaum maintains that the arts and humanities teach what it is, “to be a human being capable of love and imagination” (Nussbaum 2002, 301). Both suggest arts and humanities open us up to what it means to be citizens in an open, democratic society. In that sense, access to an education that meaningfully includes the arts and humanities is instrumental to the fulfillment of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which asserts that “[e]veryone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community.” But to what extent does that access – and the guarantee of unfettered participation – depend on wealth? This chapter argues that the right to participation laid out in Article 27 infers a positive obligation to provide opportunities to investigate what it means to be human and that education plays a vital role in doing so. Furthermore, it argues that the current educational focus on the marketplace and employability has a crowding-out effect on the exposure to the civic tools that the arts and humanities provide. While not a human rights violation per se, the current focus on education-as-job-training constitutes a barrier to the free participation in cultural life that disproportionally affects the cultural citizenship of low-income people.

Type
Chapter
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Human Rights and Economic Inequalities , pp. 316 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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