Governmental obligation to secure school attendance for all children within the compulsory-age bracket (usually 6–15) has also been litigated as have controversial school voucher schemes, which strive to reduce governmental obligations to providing some financial support to parents in their choice of schooling for their children. This would leave parent-less children without any choice, children of poor parents with very little choice, and reinforce selling education according to the purchasing power of buyers. Governmental obligations have often been judicially tested regarding education for children with disabilities, indigenous or minority children, or children deprived of their liberty, and the courts have affirmed that governments have to ensure access to education for all children. Although resource allocation is litigated the least being widely perceived as an inherently political decision, intrusions into decisions on allocations of public funding have been necessitated by the right to education (for example, governmental obligations to provide transport to school or textbooks free of charge) and rights in education (for example, assistance to learners to overcome linguistic obstacles or learning disabilities). Moreover, the importance of the right to education reaches far beyond education itself. Many individual rights are beyond the grasp of those who have been deprived of education, especially rights associated with employment and social security. Education operates as a multiplier, enhancing the enjoyment of all individual rights and freedoms where the right to education is effectively guaranteed, while depriving people of the enjoyment of many rights and freedoms where the right to education is denied or violated. 10 Right to Education Primers No. 3 This publication has been inspired by the need to overcome the mixture of confusion and contention which hampers delineating the right to education as civil, cultural, economic, political and social right. It summarizes governmental obligations corresponding to the right to education in its entirety. While education as a civil and political right has engendered a great deal of domestic and international jurisprudence and its contours are fairly well defined, progress in the vast and heterogeneous category of economic, social and cultural rights cannot be fast and easy because this category was itself a cold-war construct. Consequently, it suffered from distortions which plagued human rights during the Cold War. The notion of economic, social and cultural rights required a reconceptualization after the Cold War had ended, but it was marginalized instead to escape neglect only at the turn of the millennium. Although the Cold War is over, confusion continues as do attempts to empty economic and social rights of their core substance. These posit, explicitly or implicitly, that economic, social and cultural rights are not justiciable which, were it true, would mean that they are not rights. Such confusion feeds on two features of international human rights law: • Firstly, international human rights law is not directly applicable in most countries. International human rights standards are, in most countries, transposed into domestic law, and then interpreted and applied. It is thus crucially imports to extract from this rich and diverse material