Learning the Four As to Teach the Three Rs

A Swiss youth ambassador, a brightly-scarved nomadic girl, an oriental boy jotting in Braille, two young intellectuals poised in their wheelchairs, and a pretty pair of Palestinian refugees - what could they possibly have in common? A human right to education, that’s what.

Sixty years since the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR), seven young people found themselves on common ground last week during a “Youth Address to the Ministers” roundtable in Geneva, Switzerland. Their common task: to convey touching accounts about their diverse and often difficult experiences in obtaining Article 26 UNDHR, the right to education. It was impossible not to be moved by their voices alone, but most striking of all was how the universal right to education was so harmoniously presupposed by this future generation. Surely such an event begs certain socio-legal questions: How did we get to this point? And where can we go from here?

Certainly, the founders of human rights never even considered the right to education; the first generation of human rights essentially involved civil and political rights. It took a “second generation” of human rights to enshrine education, when it was realized that without education the “first generation” might prove meaningless. In December 1948, this title was then formalized in Article 26 of the UNDHR, so that – at least in principle and law – education was internationally accepted as a human right. This stance was gradually supported, firstly by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and, later, by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as regional instruments and national Constitutions. The ICESCR in particular set forth a bold purpose of education, namely “the achievement of the full development of the human personality and sense of dignity.”

In line with these new commitments, the right to education has been fleshed out into four components: availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability. Essentially, these features relate to what is in the best interests of the student in terms of his/her learning needs. For example, as the Chadian nomadic girl explained vividly, there is no use in building a static school for nomadic populations, nor should a school discriminate access on the basis of gender.

Yet legal terms, and in particular international legal terms, have a worrying tendency to appear abstract at the best of times, and quite redundant at the worst. Indeed, despite a dearth of obligations, an estimated 75 million children worldwide do not yet enjoy the right to education, of which 55 percent are girls, according to the latest Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Moreover, this figure only accounts for children who are not in a classroom environment, without including those who are not learning in their school. In the same report, it is also estimated that 779 million adults, of whom 66 percent are women, are illiterate.

It is clear, therefore, that in many regions of the world, the implications of a universal rights-based approach to education are yet to be fully put into practice. Particularly in the regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Gulf Arab states, literacy, access and completion rates still discriminate dramatically along gender, disability, linguistic, religious and socioeconomic lines. As a specific example, the two Palestinian refugees in Lebanon described how they were not allowed to attend the local schools due to their refugee status, while one of the students in a wheelchair explained indignantly how he was expected to move cities simply to attend school in the United States.

So is it up to us to budge? The newly appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights clearly thinks so, advocating that in the face of such challenges we reconsider our conception of education and how we implement learning programs. One recent initiative has been the implementation of human rights education, to try to convey the human rights approach less as a langue de bois, but rather a popular ethos of mutual respect. Similarly, intergovernmental frameworks on education as a human right are increasingly aiming at concrete and sustainable initiatives, based on an initial identification of respective countries’ situations.

Of course, guaranteeing the right to education is an expensive task and fortunately states can always turn to the “get out of jail free” card of Article 2 of the ICESCR: “States undertake all … measures to the maximum extent of their available resources.” Unfortunately, the “jail” may be larger than we think; Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winner, has suggested that not providing for education perpetuates social poverty and inequality, ill health and, in turn, human insecurity and communal strife.

The resource question aside, it is true that many people still don’t want to swallow the human rights discourse, it being conceived as a Western, or simply rhetorical, standard. Yet, more and more social actors are engaging within a rights-based framework, in particular local NGOs and communities, and not least of all younger generations, from all over the world. It is difficult to deny the potential of this common social vision of education with its 60 years of experience, even if it is only one of many possible approaches towards encouraging the spread of knowledge.

Indeed, it has taken a long time to get to any common global discourse on education, and there is still a long way to go. However activities like the roundtable event last week represented a tremendous occasion for all the stakeholders present, and also for those who were not. Article 26 UNDHR was not only a common grounding for the debate, it was commonly self-grounding: no one can deny the value of knowledge, for then you know too much.