Primary school children cannot form a political party, get elected
to parliament and secure budgetary allocations for their education.
The proportion of children in the northern part of the world is
small and their parents can secure funding for education, combining
their political voice with paying tax. In many developing countries,
children constitute the majority of the population but obtain a
vote only after becoming adults; hence they have to rely on their
parents and their teachers. Few of their parents pay tax, many because
they earn too little, and their vote seldom affects budgetary allocations
because there often is simply too little to distribute. Their teachers
habitually have to battle to get their rights recognized
and their salaries paid so that they could teach. Children thus
need to have their right to education fully recognized, and this
right necessarily goes beyond national and regional borders. There
can be no universal right to education unless the corresponding
governmental obligations - both individual and collective - are
also universal.
The global commitment to education as a right has recently weakened
and it may disappear altogether unless public pressure remedies
the collective reluctance of governments to accept their human rights
obligations. The collective voice of governments is supportive of
education, but not of the human right to education. The main reason
is avoidance of corollary duties and responsibilities.
The right to education entails governmental obligations on two
levels: domestic and global. Individual states are held responsible
for ensuring that human rights are effectively safeguarded, but
global economic and fiscal policies can constrain both the ability
and the willingness of individual governments to guarantee the right
to education. The identification and elimination of obstacles -
especially financial - to the realization of the right to education
is the key to redressing the increasing substitution of governmental
human rights obligations by the market logic.
The collective voice of governments continues promising education
for all, but references to the right to education are becoming conspicuously
absent. The difference between education and the right
to education is epitomized in post-war history. An international
commitment to universal primary education for all children in the
world was made once per decade. Each betrayed pledge was followed
by a similar pledge, which was also betrayed. Human rights were
invented to prevent betrayals of political commitments by translating
them into legal obligations. Thus, education as a universal human
right entails corresponding obligations for all governments and
the right to challenge its denials and violations. Human rights
are defined as governmental obligations because they do not materialize
spontaneously through the interplay of market forces or charity.
The mobilizing power of saying that a betrayed pledge is a human
rights violation is immense and legal enforcement of human rights
obligations makes violations expensive - governments have to remedy
them, compensate the victims, and ensure that similar violations
never happen again. Resort to legal enforcement requires, however,
pre-existing individual and collective commitments to the right
to education which is increasingly avoided.
The turn of the millennium has been marked by attempts to forge
consensus within the international community on diagnosing problems
and devising solutions. Ten years after the Jomtien Conference in
1990 had instilled optimism by forging a set of global commitments,
the Fourth Global Meeting of the International Consultative Forum
on Education for All took place in Dakar on 26-28 April 2000. That
meeting was dubbed Jomtien+10 in popular parlance, because
it was based on the acknowledgement that commitments made at Jomtien
in 1990 had not been met. The 1990 commitment had been to achieve
universal primary education by the year 2000; the target year was
subsequently postponed to 2015. Nothing could be done to challenge
that betrayal because no mechanism had been established to hold
those making promises accountable for their performance - or the
lack thereof. No significant improvement was achieved in the year
2000. The final document resulting from the Dakar Forum repeated
the same noble ends but failed to specify the means needed to attain
them, as well as the mechanisms necessary to challenge failures
to attain the agreed ends. The collective voice of inter-governmental
agencies and governments confined itself to defining the goals,
asking others to deliver them.
The key formulation of Jomtien, pledging that "every person
- child, youth and adult - shall be able to benefit from educational
opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs,"
was repeated ten year later in Dakar: "all children, young
people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education
that will meet their basic learning needs." There was silence
on the corresponding governmental obligations; there was silence
on the fate of education in resource allocation - from global to
local. In September 2000, the Millennium Declaration affirmed the
target year 2015 for all children to complete primary schooling,
without mentioning how that goal would be attained. There was no
mention of governmental obligations but, this time, not even of
the right to education.
This unanimity about the goal for all children to complete primary
education reduces the global targets to the first phase of schooling,
thereby negating the right to secondary and university education.
These are, indeed, at risk of becoming fully transformed into services
that are sold and purchased against a price. Moreover, retrogression
affects even primary education. The 1990 Jomtien Conference was
convened against the diminishing coverage of primary education,
especially in Africa, where the proportion of the primary-school
age population in school had declined by 10% in the 1980s.
A similar process of retrogression has subsequently taken place
in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Between 1989 and 1997, educational
enrollment of 15-year olds diminished by 20% or more in Georgia,
Moldavia or Tajikistan. The causes have been similar - diminished
ability of the state to generate revenue and to finance all-encompassing
and free-of-charge primary education, thereby replacing the right
to education as an individual entitlement by access to education
which is governed by the purchasing power of families, communities,
and countries.
Rather than focussing on the necessity to affirm and reinforce
universal governmental human rights obligations, the current global
strategies abundantly use the term partnership to depict
relations between donors and recipients, creditors and debtors,
governments and NGOs. Partnership does not reflect the relationship
between a creditor (or donor) holding a chequebook and a government
which desperately needs that cheque, nor does it fit a truism shared
amongst human rights NGOs whereby one cannot do human rights work
and be popular with governments. Human rights are safeguards against
abuse of power and require the identification of those who hold
power, so as to be able to prevent and remedy its abuse.
As adults, we have the power of affirming or negating the children’s
right to education. We can accept that children can have rights
only if we comply with our individual and collective duties. Governmental
human rights obligations are based upon the premise of governments
- individually and collectively - funding public services, which
implies their ability and willingness to raise revenue and accord
priority to human rights in its distribution. Domestically, solidarity
is enforced through the duty to pay tax from which education is
financed. Lower taxes may seem popular until they translate into
ruined public schools, whereupon the voters’ anger will alter governmental
policies or turn into apathy and cynicism if generation and distribution
of revenue is beyond their reach. Globally, the universality of
the right to education is predicated on international cooperation,
so as to equalize opportunities for the enjoyment of the right to
education by supplementing the insufficient resources of poor countries.
Constantly diminishing aid flows jeopardize the universality of
the right to education, thus challenging the very human in
the definition of human rights. Human rights activism emerged in
the 1960s with the slogan that people whose rights were protected
should act for those who were less fortunate; exposing denials and
violations of human rights was seen as the first step towards opposing
them.
What is needed today is globalization of human rights activism
in education. The adjective human implies everybody’s duty
to defend the rights of all fellow humans so that denials of the
right to education cannot continue un-exposed and un-opposed.