The right to education – but for who?

Education must truly be open to all, argues Julia Wdowin, and not just a way for the favoured to maintain their privileges.

“Everyone has the right to education” is a clearly stated right in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Everyone has a right to education, but many are excluded from it. 

Latest UNESCO data reports that around 250 million children are out of school globally. This amounts to 16% of young people around the world not attending school (from primary to upper secondary level). Some 10% of children worldwide are not in primary level education. 

Close to 30% of out-of-school children are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This together with Central and Southern Asia accounts for 50% of children out of school globally: these two world regions currently have the most children and youth outside school. 

By contrast, Europe and Northern America account for 2.7% of unschooled children in the world. Many of the youth not receiving education are in countries with wars and high levels of deprivation and poverty. Not surprisingly, these countries also have high numbers of people migrating.

Whilst education is broadly seen as one of the most effective ways to equip a person against poverty, it is this very poverty which frequently impedes children or youth from going to school. But there are other significant reasons, too. 

Apart from economic ones, these can broadly be categorised as social and cultural, meaning that the most vulnerable groups to face exclusion from education are often girls and women, as well as refugees and migrants and persons with disabilities (UNESCO). For an idea of the scale of the problem, over seven million refugee children are out of school (UNHCR).

Whilst a physical lack of educational facilities or lack of financial means are common critical barriers to education in some parts of the world, there are numerous, sometimes more hidden, ways in which people are excluded from education. Hidden because, whilst the opportunity to education may be hypothetically available, there are other factors that impede persons from benefiting from it. 

These include language and other cultural barriers which are particularly disruptive to refugees and migrants. There are other types of exclusion, too, such as the mere fact of being a girl in some countries, or having a disability. 

And so, many people who are already deprived of various basic needs are further exposed to being deprived of the transformational life opportunities and freedom which education provides. 

Pope Francis pointed to this crisis last January, having asked all believers to pray for and concern themselves with those most vulnerable to being excluded from education, with a particular focus on those suffering from warfare or displacement, namely migrants and refugees.

As Pope Francis said, denying a right to education is a grave injustice because of what it denies the person: their hope and opportunity to make their way through life.

The lack of education deprives a person of the freedom to flourish. 

The value of education should be seen not only in terms of the life opportunities it offers, but also in terms of what it saves from. As the Pope explained, education can save migrants and refugees from discrimination, criminal networks and exploitation, especially that of minors. 

Universal education

One can give many arguments for the importance of education, but I would simply like to focus on one. Education is integral to character building and to happier, flourishing lives. 

So fundamental is this dimension to the understanding and purpose of education that it is expressed in Article 26.2 of the UDHR, directly following the article stating the human right to education. “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality”, it states.

And this is where we most risk losing out in the developed West. With our educational systems becoming ever more directed towards certain spheres such as technology and wealth creation, we risk losing sight of what education actually is. Ever more confused about morality and what the human person is, we don’t know how to develop human personality. 

For this we would do well to draw on insights from the great religions, especially turning back to the roots of Christianity and its strongly worked out ethical system. 

We should also value our own Western culture and not reject it, and value too the humanities, taught without modern ideological baggage. We could also learn a lot from so many values maintained in poorer countries, like openness to life and children, respect for the elderly and the prioritising of human relations over ruthless economic efficiency.

Yet, the inseparable link between individual personality development and the flourishing of broader society, in other words, the common good, is also a clear feature of the same article of the UDHR (Article 26.2). 

It continues saying that education should be directed also ‘to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’ and ‘to promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups…’ 

Education is, thus, a human right for what it confers to the individual but also for its role in building up the common good.

Maybe in the West we need an education that focuses more on what we can give the world, and our responsibility to serve the poor at home and abroad.

Not an empty right

Affirming the right to education for each and every person is a significant, and even vital statement, but stated rights can be empty. 

Thus, the Pope’s intention prays for the right to education to be respected. Rights, in order to mean anything at all, need to be substantiated by real opportunity. The right to fish, for example, is not of much use to someone without a fishing rod or who doesn’t know how to fish.

In substantiating and defending the right to education for all, it is therefore imperative to work to create the credible conditions that make education a possibility for those most vulnerable to be excluded from it. 

Whilst this necessarily depends on contextual factors in order to succeed, it involves considering how to make real positive measures that are socially, culturally and individually appropriate for the most marginalised individuals, including refugees and migrants, or those in places affected by war.

Going forward

The scale of exclusion from education around the world will require macro-scale responses at international and national levels and action that targets the problems at its roots. 

Whilst a structural, governmental response is fundamental for this largely publicly-provided  good (or by the third sector), a lot also hinges on personal decisions. 

In a world congress for educators in November 2015, Pope Francis told them: “Here is the first challenge that I tell you: leave the places where there are many educators and go to the peripheries… Or at least, leave half of them there! Look there for the needy, the poor. 

“And they have something that young people from the richer neighborhoods do not have – not through their own fault, but it is a sociological reality: they have the experience of survival, even of cruelty, even of hunger, even of injustices.” 

These words call on us to consider how we spread and share our time and attention, and reminds us to not commercialise education or excessively hyper-educate the already educated at the cost of those who really have very little access to learning.

All of us, each in our own way, have a role to play in cultivating a better understanding of what the purpose of education is in individuals’ lives and for the good of humanity as a whole. 

And we can all play a role in maintaining an essential distinction: that between education and all that it brings to our lives and flourishing, and mere information (or often misinformation), being drowned in an online sea of data.

In that same 2015 speech, Pope Francis warned against what he called an education ‘within walls’. “The biggest failure an educator can have,” he said, “is to educate ‘within walls’. To educate within the walls of a selective culture…” 

This is an education which closes us within our own privileges or self-interests, which keeps the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Education and its ’levelling up’ is not a zero-sum situation and Pope Francis makes reference to this when he says that ‘respecting the right [to education] is good for migrants and good for society’.

There are other practical ways to be supportive, too, like financially supporting those charities, organisations and people working to make education available to those in the most excluded places, such as the charity Mary’s Meals. 

And we can be supportive in encouraging others in their education, whatever path this might take, especially towards those who might not receive encouragement from anyone else.

This makes macro-level interventions and person-to-person interactions two sides of the same coin of education. Extending education and distributing real access to it universally and fairly, in line with understanding its wider purpose, is not a zero-sum situation, but rather a lifeline to human flourishing and the common good.

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