COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS BEGINS GENERAL DISCUSSION ON RIGHT TO EDUCATION

MORNING
HR/ESC/98/43
30 November 1998




United Nations experts, agency officials, academics, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) spoke this morning on the right to education, calling for greater recognition of education's role in achieving goals ranging from sexual equality to economic growth to peace and tolerance. They said renewed efforts were needed to make sure all the world's children received at least primary schooling and stressed that girls must be given an equal chance to learn.

A number of speakers at a special meeting of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stressed the complexity and wide-ranging nature of the issue, pointing out that the right to education suffered because its implications were diffused and cut across a range of other rights -- that education could be defined as a civil, political, economic, social, or cultural right, and that it also had ramifications for rights to sexual equality and freedom from discrimination.

Several participants called for more careful definition and measurement of rates of education, so that progress -- or lack of it -- around the world could be more carefully monitored.

Among those addressing the meeting were Katarina Tomasevski, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to education, and Mustapha Mehedi, a member of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities appointed to carry out a study on the subject and on the related importance of education in human rights.

The Committee's Chairman, Philip Alston, began the session by saying there were 835 million functionally illiterate people in the world, and 130 million children with no access to basic education, two-thirds of them girls. If 835 million people had been tortured last year, "all hell would have broken loose", he said, yet these figures for education somehow did not draw the same outrage. But denial of education amounted to destruction of lives, and to destruction of future lives.

Those attending included representatives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); International Bureau of Education (including several academics and several representatives of NGOs); the World University Service; and the American Association of Jurists.

The Committee has set aside the day for the general discussion on the right to education, and will reconvene at 3 p.m. to continue the debate.

Statements

PHILIP ALSTON, Chairman of the Committee, said the trend towards "main streaming" human rights meant the United Nations and others in the human-rights field needed to move away from a concept of competition between human rights and between agency activities towards a concept of complementarity. Education was one of those causes that did not receive enough sustained attention and teamwork. It was a prime example of the indivisibility of human rights, as it was a social right, a cultural right, an economic right, a civil right, and a political right. There were 835 million functionally illiterate people in the world, and 130 million children with no access to basic education, two-thirds of them girls. If 835 million people had been tortured last year, all hell would have broken loose -- yet these figures for education somehow did not draw the same outrage. But denial of education amounted to destruction of lives, and to destruction of future lives. Mr. Alston suggested that a way be found to issue a comprehensive report each year on the right to education, instead of numerous agencies and organizations issuing their own studies and reports, "all in their own little pigeonholes", with none of the publications being noticed very much.

KATARINA TOMASEVSKI, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to education, said a particularly pertinent issue related to the indivisibility of human rights and the right to education was that it was not only a right but a duty. Surveying the situation around the world, she had found that many countries had compulsory primary education -- but that did not necessarily mean the right was realized; more work was needed on the subject of what education was. Resource allocation -- a highly political process -- did not favour education sufficiently; the model of economic development of the 1990s made people redundant, irrelevant to economic growth, and so the political impetus, which was dedicated to profit, did not channel enough money towards education. Another problem was that primary-school children were politically powerless and the majority of their parents around the world were struggling merely to survive and had little political influence, and so these groups could not battle very effectively for the resources needed for education. A third problem was that the matter was fragmented between different human-rights treaties and was spread between treaties on children, on women, on economic, social and cultural rights, and on indigenous peoples, among others. A way had to be found to unify all these causes and concerns.

MUSTAPHA MEHEDI, member of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, said education in the field of human rights was an important component of the right to education in general; the intent of the study assigned him was to clarify the content of the right to education -- its cross-cutting nature -- and to promote education in human rights. Education in human rights had relevance for education in general because it enhanced development of the best climate for carrying out education; it taught tolerance and respect for individual cultures; it established the best political, social and cultural context for education. He hoped that continued and greater emphasis would be placed on the matter on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

K. SAVOLAINEN, Director of the Department of Education for a Culture of Peace, of UNESCO, said the "education for democracy" effort of UNESCO reflected the role of education in achieving peace, tolerance, and non-discrimination; education really did help realize human rights, and vice versa. You could not have tolerance and peace without education, and you could not have freedom from discrimination. UNESCO had a reporting system on instances of discrimination in the education system, and it would be good if it could be linked with other reporting systems seeking to improve the conditions of girls and indigenous peoples; it also was important that countries reply to these reporting systems -- too often there were no Government responses to requests for information, or the responses were cursory. One current UNESCO project was the publication of a manual for teachers on human-rights instruction.

W. GORDON, Director, Section for Primary Education, UNESCO, said action had been sluggish although the cause of primary education had been written about and talked about for years; what was needed was implementation of the right. What was needed was action at the level of the classroom: children had to be brought there and once there they had to be provided with an atmosphere in which they could learn effectively. UNESCO did not have a lot of money but what it could do was offer advocacy and advice, helping Governments with the technical and other challenges of sustainably bringing education to all their children. Money was not enough, in any case -- it had to be spent effectively. If the billions of dollars that had been channelled into Africa over the decades for education had been used effectively, no one would be sitting in this room today discussing the problem.

BERTRAND COPPENS, Regional Representative and Acting Director, European Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said UNDP did not have a specific mandate for education but saw it in the context of addressing and eradicating poverty; its involvement was based on requests received from countries, and clearly education was vital for eradicating poverty. The organization tried to make countries see the link between education and economic progress, and also tried to make them see the connection between education and sustainable progress. Translating policies into practice was not an easy thing to do, however, in the field of education; often there were conflicts or disagreements with Governments because of cultural and other ramifications. A prominent UNDP "benchmark" in measuring a country's quality of life was free, universal, compulsory education; UNDP also felt that at least 20 per cent of Government expenditures and 20 per cent of aid coming from outside should go to social expenditures, including education.

BILGE OGUN BASSANI, Deputy Director, UNICEF Regional Office for Europe, said the education problem was manageable; 55 per cent of children deprived of schooling lived in five countries, among them India and Pakistan; if something could be done in those countries a great deal of progress could be made. UNICEF worked towards specific goals in the field of education -- it tried to find goals and targets so that there was more done than sitting around and talking and analysing. Among other things, the "education for all" programme had come up with a series of basic indicators, and UNICEF was targeting four: establishing gender equality in education; universal attendance; teaching of literacy, math, and life skills; and completion of five years' education. Challenges to be met were proximity of schools; affordability -- school uniforms often cost parents two months' salary; respect for cultural diversity; and provision of a safe and supportive environment.

Discussion

Committee members, agency officials, and NGO representatives sounded several themes, among them a need for better statistical and qualitative indicators on rates of education; the need to respect local and regional cultures while at the same time ensuring that girls were given equal opportunity to education; the need to avoid negative aspects of "globalization" as they applied to education, such as over-standardization of textbooks and curricula; the importance of ensuring that a sufficient proportion of the budgets of developing countries was spent on social programmes, including education, and that a sufficient proportion of aid sent to such countries was set aside for social priorities; and the necessity of reducing the costs of education as applied to parents and children -- it was mentioned several times that even paying for school uniforms often was too much of a burden for a poverty-stricken family.

Abdessatar Grissa, a Committee member, said a major problem was that "Generals are more powerful than children, than teachers. Most African countries are governed by generals". As a result, he said, budgets were skewed towards military expenditures and if children were educated, they were educated "in how to shoot each other".

Education was not prohibitively costly in economic terms, said Patrice Meyer-Bish of the University of Fribourg; the reason education was not universally applied was that it was costly politically -- if you really provided it, then you had to provide a number of concomitant cultural rights: rights to diversity in language and identity, rights to widespread political participation and expression, and rights to history and literature. The complexity of the right to education had to be embraced rather than ignored, he said.