Women in Motion for the right to Education
GEO strategies towards CONFINTEA VI

CONFINTEA VI Road Map

- ICAE 2^nd. Sub Regional Workshop on Citizens’ Watch – March 26-28, 2008

ICAE SEVENTH WORLD ASSEMBLY
ADULTS’ RIGHT TO LEARN:  
CONVERGENCE, SOLIDARITY AND ACTION  
Nairobi, Kenya  January 17-19, 2007  
Venue: Panafric Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya
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The Right to Education in the World:
a look to the goals of Education for All

Read here Vernor Muñoz’s speech, UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Education, in the III Assembly of the Global Campaign for Education

27 January, 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. Below is the complete transcription of his opening speech in São Paulo, on the challenges of Education for All.

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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...

See VOICES RISING Nº253