H Human Rights and Education Félix García Moriyo ´n Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain Introduction Humanity is facing at present a deep transforma- tion in every domain of human life: politics, economics, social relationships, religious beliefs, etc. If we accept Castells’s approach (Castells 1997), the core of this transformation is the pro- cess of globalization dominated by the web and the flows of information. Both web and flows are characterized by flexibility, so that they can adapt very fast at any change in the environment, and mobility, because they keep changing all the time. There is not any specific center of the web, only nodes that also can change, grow, and disappear. Societies are connected through rapid, large- scale networks on interaction, modifying daily our notions of time and space. However, as long as these globalization processes are dominated by neoliberal conception of society, it is economics that is the mainstream of every policy implemented by governments and all social insti- tutions; and only those policies that yield an increase in money benefits are the good ones, not to say that they are the only possible policies. Free market is accepted as the only point of reference and as the yardstick everybody uses to assess the achievements of social life: the more free market we have, the best for all and for everything. One of the worst consequences of this reductive approach (economics, free market, and managerial manners) is that instead of glob- alization offering a more inclusive and solitary relationship between nations and cultures, it has fostered exclusion and has broadened and deep- ened the gap between the wealthy and the poor. Poverty (cultural, social, or economic) is at pre- sent a worse problem that it was 30 years ago when the process of globalization just started its new and accelerated pace. This pessimistic conclusion is in tune with Lyotard’s earlier analysis of postmodern condi- tion (Lyotard 1984). Some tendencies Lyotard identifies in advanced technological societies have not faded away; even more, they are at present more deeply rooted in social life than in 1979, when Lyotard published his critical description. I want – just for the purposes of this entry – to mention only two characteristics: first, performance and effectiveness have displaced justification as criterion of personal and social behavior, and knowledge, as any other thing, has been commercialized to the point of becom- ing one of the main commodities in economic markets; second, people have difficulties in accepting a vision of humanity as a whole (“metanarratives”), and they have the tendency to take into account only individualistic concep- tions of human action where everybody upholds # Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2015 M. A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_333-1