Education For All, Or Only For Those Who Can Pay ? by Katarina Tomasevski UN Special Rapporteur on The Right to Education 2:15am 3rd Apr, 2004   31 March 2004    Schooling is unaffordable to most people in some of the countries that need it most, says a United Nations human rights expert in denouncing a "global education deficit".    According to Katarina Tomasevski, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to education, this deficit is epitomized by the fact that no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country charges for compulsory education, while primary education is free in only three African countries. Worse, nine years of compulsory education has become the norm in the OECD, while five or even three years of primary education is the African average.     "The illogic of expecting education to eliminate poverty while those too poor to afford the cost are excluded necessitates open recognition and urgent action", says Ms. Tomasevski, who is presenting her last annual report to the Commission at its ongoing sixtieth session.     "We have 83 years old international legal norms obliging governments to make education free and compulsory", says Ms. Tomasevski, "and they were adopted because we knew then as we know today that education cannot be made compulsory unless it is free, and that we doom children to labour, or even criminality, unless we ensure their right to education."     "Denial of children's right to education cannot be retroactively remedied", the Special Rapporteur continues. "The right to education operates as multiplier, it unlocks all other human rights when guaranteed and forecloses them all when denied".    Global education statistics provide varying estimates of the number of out-of-school children, ranging between 100 and 130 million. Although the exact number is unknown, says Ms. Tomasevski, the reason is not -it is the poorest who are excluded. Her report to the Commission summarizes her findings on the state of primary education in the world. It is not free in 90 countries, almost half of the countries in the world. The largest number is in Africa (38), followed by Asia (19), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (14), Latin America and the Caribbean (11), and Middles East and North Africa (8).    Her two country missions in the past year, to the People's Republic of China and Colombia have highlighted the financial obstacles for free primary education. The principal reason is the priority for military expenditure over investment in education in government budgets, says Ms.Tomasevski.    Ms. Tomasevski says the barrage of statistics routinely reported about global strategies to achieve education for all cloak the principal question: What is education for? Compulsory education bestows upon governments the power to force all children into school where they can be indoctrinated or abused unless human rights safeguards are in place. This is where human rights should make all the difference, she says. Children are killed at school as corporal punishment remains rampant, even where it has been formally banned. Or, the parents are being forced to work if they cannot afford the payments for their children's education, even primary school children are forced to work at school, some die working.    For most children, the Special Rapporteur says, the knowledge that they have rights, let alone human rights education, is a distant dream. "If children know that they have rights", says a parent quoted in her report, "they become uncontrollable." Indeed, the very idea that children have rights is new and frightening to many, says Ms. Tomasevski. The almost universal ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the child cloaks a great deal of disagreement. She adds: "Teachers, who should be the principal agents for human rights education, can do nothing where their own rights are denied. They are still killed, often merely for being educators".
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