February 2008
Invited by the Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education, the UN special rapporteur on Right to Education, Vernor Muñoz, from Costa Rica, stood in São Paulo from 24 to 26 January. The rapporteur coordinated the workshop “Justiciability of the Right to Education”, promoted by the CLADE; he participated in the III Assembly of the Global Campaign for Education as well as in the seminar “Education in the World - A Balance", within the framework of the World Social Forum.
Read here Vernor Muñoz’s speech, UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Education, in the III Assembly of the Global Campaign for Education that took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil 22-24 January 2008.
The right to education does not limit itself to the pedagogic experience, given that it implies everything that, being beyond - or near - the school, affects it profoundly.
In this way, education can transform social structures and has the ability to give a new dimension to living practices, to teaching and learning processes and, certainly, to the constitution of citizenships.
For this reason, policies insensitive to children and adolescents’ protection and to the special needs of adults living in illiteracy, for instance, aggravate the exclusion of more than one thousand five hundred million people whose right to education is currently denied.
Social discrimination and the lack of educational opportunities, though, also occur when students have to face a school environment insensitive to their rights, needs and cultures due to a curriculum that hurts human diversity.
There exist enough historical grounds to understand that the basis of an important part of education exclusion is found in the very structure of traditional school.
In fact, the need to standardize and make the “input” performance efficient was the reason that motivated the creation of a concept of school based on the elimination of the differences between people, thus imposing an asymmetric patriarchal model based on the market needs.
During the last decades, the creation of a legal and axiological body having human rights as a reference has implied a substantial change in educational conceptions, but also a renewed understanding of learning processes.
The challenges imposed to advance in the construction of a human rights culture are, though, huge.
We all know that we live in a world with eight hundred million adults who don’t know how to read and write or make basic arithmetic operations, and 64% of these people are women.
Most conservative opinions estimate that 80 million children still don’t go to school, that 58 countries won’t reach universal primary education by 2015 and that 72 countries won't be able to reduce illiteracy rates to half by 2015, as proposed by Dakar goals.
Despite the important advances in sub-Saharan Africa and in Southern and West Asia, it is precisely in these regions where girls most deeply suffer the lack of educational opportunities: while in the South of Asia 23.5 millions of girls do not go to school, in the centre and the west of Africa almost half of the girls are also excluded.
To this discouraging situation has to be added 25% of people older than 15 years of age which are illiterate in Central America, mainly girls and women living in poverty, natives and residents of rural areas.
As a general rule, poorest and most unprivileged children do not have access to early childhood assistance and education programmes and, taking into account the most optimistic projections, the goal of achieving universal primary education will take at least ten more years than expected, as by 2015 there will still be 47 million children not going to school and 47 countries that will not meet the goal of universal provision of educational facilities almost until the first half of the century.
In these countries, 75% of girls and boys mothers don’t receive education either. Besides, it is now clear that 72 countries will not be able to reduce, before 2015, their adult population illiteracy rates to half given that, among other causes, a great deal of the external financing required for education is destined to middle income countries and not to fragile states or to the most impoverished ones. Many of these countries still charge for education.
The lack of concrete opportunities, school infrastructure, didactic materials, qualified teachers, direct and complementary services for the accomplishment of the right to education (like feeding, sanitary facilities and security to and from the school), as well as problems of quality and appropriateness, are a task delayed year after year.
Economic obstacles that developing countries have to face, like an unfair and unpayable external debt and the absence of public policies centred on the needs of girls and boys contribute to the difficulties to increase the finance resources destined to education at least to 6% of the gross national product, as recommended by international standards.
Even worse, in many cases the budget destined to armies continue to grow to the detriment of education. For instance, in African and South and West of Asia countries, hardly an average equal or inferior to 3.5% of the gross national product is assigned to education.
The lack of girls and boys rights accomplishment responds to decisions or omissions only attributable to adults; but as it is stated in the Convention of the Right of the Child, it will be impossible to find the best solutions to these problems without the participation of people under age in the matters that concern them.
The fact that no country has managed to eliminate the gender gap in all aspects of social life constitutes an upsetting reality. This means that gender inequality is not a mechanical consequence of poverty, as it has also been widely documented in North America and in Europe, for example, where persistent inequalities in the access and significant barriers in detriment of women negatively affect girls’ education and their life opportunities.
Rhetoric in favour of children’s rights has not prevented education from continuing to be one of the last priorities within the budget considerations and one of the last favoured within public policies.
Domestic child labour, the one paid and the one carried out under quasi slavery conditions, continue to be the main cause of exploitation and violence, and one of the factors that has moved millions of children away from school in the most perverse way.
Child labour has worse education consequences to the girls as they have to face other forms of aggression and exclusion associated to their tasks and, to make it worse, they don’t even receive an economic recognition for the domestic tasks, usually reserved for them, that can go up to seven hours a day.
Even if gender inequality in education has local and regional characteristics, there is a series of elements shared in many countries, like poverty (that also expresses multiple exclusions), dangerous schools environments, textbooks stereotypes, the lack of will of parents to invest or get interested in girls and teenagers’ education, child labour, social and cultural discriminatory practices, restrictions to freedom of movement and expression of girls and teenagers and, certainly, war.
It is estimated that at least half of the 80 million boys and girls that do not receive education live in countries with conflict situations or that have suffered conflicts recently. In eight of those countries, net enrolment ratios are less than 50% and of the 17 countries of sub-Saharan Africa where enrolment was reduced last decade, six were affected by wars.
Almost half of the 3.6 million people who died in war since 1990 were children.
Besides this terrible impact, the persisting recruitment of boys and girls by armies, militias and rebellious movements in at least 60 countries must be also added.
At the end of 2005 it remained clear enough that the goal of gender parity considered by the Millennium Goals and Education for All failed in 94 of the 149 countries from which there is information available.
Eighty six countries run the risk of not achieving the gender parity even for 2015; 76 countries have not even reached gender parity in primary education and girls and teenagers continue to suffer the disparities.
Had the goal been achieved, today there would be 14 million more girls in primary education. But the truth is that in 41 countries -that correspond to 20 million girls not attending classes- the gender gap is becoming deeper or it is tighten so slowly that equality won’t be achieved until 2040.
Anyway, the concept of “parity”, that implies a simple quantification of girls and teenagers enrolled, does not reflect the substantive concept of “gender equality”, that considers the Beijing Declaration and its 1995 Platform of Action and thus, it is not useful either to value the progress in quality education.
Despite the global situation, some countries have made enormous efforts in all continents, increasing general enrolment and reducing the gender gap, like the cases of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India, Mozambique, the United Republic of Tanzania, Yemen and Zambia. Some countries have created mechanisms for the participation of boys and girls in educational decisions, like in Morocco. Other countries fight against the processes of marketing of education, like Nicaragua; others make progress in adults’ literacy, like China, and others assign more financial resources to it, like Bolivia and Malaysia.
I have consistently pointed out in all my reports that school access in itself is not a guarantee and the need to encourage quality education based on learning and experiencing human rights is a requirement to develop an efficient resistance against forms of exclusion and discrimination.
One of the causes of the difficulties to make the right to education effective is the opposition to consider this right as the space in which human rights converge, particularly when it is about discriminated cultures that are subject to social and economic domination.
The resistance to the fact that education works according to its basic purposes turns on the denial of the human right to education, since the knowledge that is not built within the development of a personality respectful towards human rights is low quality knowledge.
In other words, education from and within human rights is a condition to the adequate development of the personality and to an integral protection of human dignity and the ecosystems.
The goal of education is then to promote those changes by building capacities in all people that respect and accomplish human rights; it is about an education for equality and therefore, for a more fair, supportive, equitable and pacifist society.
The disconnection between purposes and actions in education operates within the framework of structural inequalities and asymmetries, in which the false idea that economic development is the main goal of education is also promoted, generally considered as a cost and not as a human right.
It is true that we all expect economic effects from education and literacy, but it is different to believe that those effects are its essential purpose.
For these reasons, many of the debates and demands related to the need to invest on education including the well-meaning campaigns from non-governmental organizations - reduce girls, boys and teenagers’ rights to fuzzy components of macroeconomic factors, like when it is said that one of the main goals of enrolment is the possibility to increase per capita growth.
Economic growth not always leads to human development. Therefore, it is inappropriate to propose the accomplishment of the right to education as a determining factor of productive efficiency, given that per capita income dos not have either an evident relation to social equity.
This utilitarian perspective attacks human dignity and distracts the essential purposes of education; this is why it has failed as a strategy to raise awareness in governments and international financing entities.
On the other hand, it is obviously true that educational systems must change their purposes and strategies if they do not dignify Life, but it is also true that many of the huge problems of education do not have to do with school systems but with the essentially discriminatory socio-economic environment.
Investments on girls’ education, specially those which purpose is to improve its coverage and quality, have a social return demonstrated in the reduction of mortality rates and not wanted birth rates, in the fight against poverty, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition.
These positive effects should lead to strengthen human rights integration into actions and policies from the States and the World Bank, instead of reducing educational matters to an instrumental matter.
It has been also said that the measurement of the progress around the performance of the goals of Education For All strongly lies in the use of statistical data, which leads to a real paradox, considering the inexistence or the limited development of qualitative indicators with enough capacity to determine the nature and incidence of specific obstacles that produce and promote exclusion, discrimination and denial of human rights to millions of people, including native, Romany and Dalits peoples.
The use of general quantitative indicators that mediate enrolment increase rates and are usually applied to measure “progresses” is not useful enough.
These indicators do not reflect the complexity of inequalities and social exclusion; rather, they don’t see the needs of children, of people with disabilities and minority groups, and they conspire with damaging practices to human rights, by avoiding a specific characterization of the causes of the delay, violence and segregation and the denial to modify public policies that validate and perpetuate these practices.
These exclusions also appear in developed countries where many times escape the attention of governments due to the lack of visibility of migrant populations, for example, and of people with intellectual disabilities who, in Europe, continue to face prejudices and obstacles that prevent them from accomplishing their rights, including education.
The discrimination that is reproduced and nourished within the school field is also a consequence of the almost generalized lack of an inclusive education which purpose would be to eliminate discrimination and favour educational opportunities equally.
It is also reproduced in the absence of educational models culturally placed and that respect diversity; in the long distances girls and boys have to walk to go to school, in the lack of a secured transport, in the absence of integral and permanent processes of gender sensitisation and training addressed to teachers, in the few interest for the reinsertion and permanence of mothers and pregnant teenagers, in the lack of sexual education and in the costs of registration, uniforms, feeding, textbooks and didactic materials that families have to defray and that have a more adverse impact on the girls.
The long way towards human equality and dignity has also suffered deep delays due to the outrageous rhetoric of a world political class reluctant to consider education as a human right that must be respected and developed.
We have been witnesses of countless moves that delay state obligations regarding economic, social and cultural rights and that, stealthily, transform those obligations in wordiness or in plans and purposes that never become real.
But we also know there are those who hold the World with their daily hope. You, fighters; you, a testimony of courage and enthusiasm.
Each dream and each fight open grooves. In the same way, we know that each rule of law in the old shelves of UN deals with the living memory of peoples, persons, girls, grandmothers who lived raising their voices against oppression and death.
Those voices got here and you pick them up and boost them. Now is our turn to give a sense to this memory in order to eradicate inequality; never again closed doors, never again empty classrooms.
