Inter-relatedness of human rights creates overlap between
different components of the right to education but it also
facilitates mapping out the conceptual framework of the right
to education, presented in Box 1. The framework demonstrates
this inter-relatedness of individual components of the right to
education, relates them to the type of governmental human
rights obligations which are their counterparts, and adds
examples of issues that figure prominently in translating the
right to education from requirement into reality.
•
Access is defined differently for different levels of
education. The government is obliged to secure access to
education for all children in the compulsory education
age-range, but not for secondary and higher education.
Moreover, compulsory education ought to be free of
charge while post-compulsory education may entail the
payment of tuition and other charges5 and could thus be
subsumed under ‘affordability.’ The increasing trend of
charging fees at post-compulsory education, contrary to
the spirit of international human rights law, will be
addressed in Primer 7, which is devoted to university
education.
•
One important facet of the acceptability of education
has been highlighted by the addition of ‘quality’ before
education in policy documents as of the 1990s, thus
urging governments to ensure that education which is
available and accessible is of good quality. The minimal
standards of health and safety, or professional
requirements for teachers, thus have to be set and
enforced by the government. The scope of acceptability
has been considerably broadened through the
development of international human rights law.
Censorship of school textbooks is no different from any
other censorship, except that is it exposed as a human
4-A scheme in a nutshell
A consequence of the symmetry of law is that there could be
no right to education without corresponding obligations for
governments. The basic framework of governmental obligations
is outlined through a series of explicit guarantees of the right
to education in international human rights treaties, national
constitutions, and domestic laws. These obligations can be
easily structured into the 4-A scheme, as sketched in Box 2:
governments have to make education available, accessible,
acceptable and adaptable.
•
Availability embodies two different governmental
obligations: the right to education as a civil and political
right requires the government to permit the establishment
of educational institutions by non-state actors, while the
right to education as a social and economic right requires
the government to establish them, or fund them, or use a
combination of these and other means so as to ensure that
education is available.
5
There is difference in the explicit provisions of international human rights treaties,
with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
requiring the broadening of free-of-charge education upwards to the highest levels
and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child reiterating that primary
education should be free of charge but implicitly endorsing the charging of fees in
secondary and higher education.
Right to Education Primers No. 3
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