The paper reports the author’s experiences of using the Children’s Rights perspective in theoretical and empirical studies investigating power issues in education. The conception of the relationship between education and power, mainly based on philosophical, sociological and political theories of power (Nuutinen 1994), will be presented shortly along with empirical studies of teachers’ power thinking and analysis of textbooks written for teachers and teacher students. The paper elucidates the author’s motives for becoming interested in the Children’s Rights perspective, i.e. the dilemma raised by Finnish teachers’ strong autonomy in choosing their methods and their mainly relativistic dispositions to power, and diverse, even conflicting, ways of using power towards children. However, one cannot expect exact, final solutions when using the Children’s Rights Convention text as a normative tool, for example, in evaluating different ideas and practices of pedagogic power used by teachers. Understandably, the Convention text in itself inspires different interpretations and political discourses (see Roose & Bouverne – De Bie 2007), which can easily be critiqued for detrimental relativism too. The interpretation of the Children’s Rights Convention text chosen for the present sub study investigating textbooks is based on Mary John’s book “Children’s rights and power”. The benefits and limits of John’s thinking in the analysis will be presented as an example in the paper. However, from the theoretical point of view of the present study, divergent interpretations and discourses around Children’s Rights are not a problem which should be avoided in one way or another. Rather, they form an interesting part of the main phenomena under investigation. Theoretically, though being normative in essence, the Children’s Rights Convention can serve various purposes in the power–education discourse, which are to be made explicit in the paper. The paper ends with a discussion of the methodological problems of applying the Children’s Rights perspective in the study of education–power relations. Methodological holism is seen capable of overcoming the limitations of methodological individualism, and if needed, reformulating the relevant educational and research questions raised by the individualist thinkers in the social context. The Children’s Rights Convention, like school statutes or curricula, is an intentionally created social construct, not an accidental result produced by independent individual actors. Similarly violations of the children's rights, although in the end experienced by the individual child, cannot always be explained properly with reference to actioning of the power subjects intersubjectively related (like parents, guardians or teachers) to the child.

Conclusions: Children's Rights are in essence normative, social construct capable to be used for diverse purposes, raising divergent interpretations, related to and also originating (power) discourses and necessitating methodologically holistic main orientation accepting dialog with individualistic problem setting.