A Critical Analysis of the Explicit and Implicit Treatment of Human Rights Education in Early Childhood Education Textbooks

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly recognizes that children are entitled to the full range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. Despite the powerful social function of textbooks in legitimizing cultural norms in primary and secondary education, there has been little attention on human rights issues in early childhood education (ECE) curricular materials. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the explicit and implicit representation of human rights education (HRE) in ECE textbooks. Our quantitative and qualitative results show that ECE textbooks failed to find any explicit mention of children’s rights, an excessive attention focused on t…