The rationale of the right to education is that it functions as a multiplier, enhancing all rights and freedoms when it is guaranteed while jeopardizing them all when it is violated. Ensuring education for all children has been governmental responsibility in many countries for a long time because it is informed by a sound rationale. Schooling a whole generation creates an educated labour force and an informed electorate. Depriving the young of education denies them – and their countries – a future. Even more important is education as institutionalized socialization of the young. Forging a nation-state was the key purpose of education when it became compulsory. It was made compulsory so as to teach new generations a common language and instil in them a sense of shared, collective identity. That education had been made compulsory before it became a right explains its key features.

Because the right to education, as an ostensibly universal concept, was grounded in the process of industrialization and nation-building, the model was – and remains – ill suited for rural populations. Rounding up children from scattered rural communities to transport them to a building called school is prohibitively expensive. Also, key purposes of education change. The official national language may not be known or used. If local languages are used instead, teachers have to be recruited and trained locally. But then, who decides on the profile of teachers? On what children and to be taught and how? On incentives for parents to free children from subsistence farming for full-time schooling? Such questions impose themselves and should be tackled. Of course, it is easier to ignore them but education suffers as do its supposed beneficiaries.

The paradox of human rights is the double role of the state, as protector and violator. International human rights instruments are created by the states, represented by their governments. They define the intolerable, the universal minimum below which no government should be allowed to sink. The human rights which have been defined as universal entail corresponding governmental obligations. As elsewhere, human rights safeguards emerged in education to mould the role of the state. Decades of open and covert disagreement have not led to a global consensus. This books maps out where such consensus exists and where it is absent.