ABSTRACT
The Twentieth Session of the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values, which is the leading international forum for researchers working in the field of religious educators, was held at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake, Chicago in August 2016. The main theme of the conference was ‘Values, Human Rights and Religious Education’. This chapter considers the role of rights in religious education—to assess their relevance and importance, features that are almost universally endorsed by religious educators. Human rights provide a bulwark against encroachments both by the state and by other people. Moreover, rights are required for the satisfaction of certain needs, the achievement of certain goods, the protection of certain interests and the attainment of certain values. In the immediate post-war years, values in British education were believed to be transmitted through the curriculum as a whole, by a process of osmosis.
