Tomasevski / Human Rights Obligations in Education: The 4-A Scheme

This book describes how human rights safeguards should be applied in education. Its point of departure is the fact that education can - and does violate human rights, notably when it is imposed upon the indigenous or minorities so as to obliterate their identity. Human rights are defined as safeguards against abuse of power, whose counterpart are governmental human rights obligations. These are to make education available, accessible, acceptable, hence the 4-A scheme. The purpose of human rights work is to expose and oppose abuses of power. They can be detected in the very design of education strategies. Defining availability of primary education as a development target, removed into distant future, negates the right to education and the corresponding governmental obligations, individual and collective. The book uses examples from different regions to describe safeguards that are necessary to transform political promises into legal obligations. Where education is available, access may be conditioned by purchasing power rather than defined as a human right. Denials of the right to education include disrimination against non-citizens or girls. They demonstrate the crucial import of human rights, the need to differentiate between poverty- and policy-based exclusion from education. Acceptability of education entails ensuring that education does not violate human rights and is worthy of its name. Typical human rights cases have challenged, in all corners of the world, the language of instruction, censorshop of textbooks or harassment of teachers for introducing human rights education. Also, human rights challenges are epitomized in the requirement to adapt education to learners, to recognize them as subjects of rights. On the micro-level, adapting education to children with disabilities has triggered human rights challenges world-wide. On the macro-level, adaptability tackes the very design of education. Graduate unemployment illustrates shortcomings of treating education as a self-contained sector as do choices between public and private, secular and religious, segregated and all-inclusive education.