Gender and Education for All THE LEAP TO EQUALITY

Chapter - Rights, equality and Education for All

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Extending the agenda The Dakar goals go well beyond those set out in the human rights treaties: they establish a more ambitious agenda. It is clear that human rights legislation has had only partial success in delivering equality in education. Perhaps, then, the benefits of separately securing government commitment to honour these same rights, using conference declarations as instruments, should be questioned. In what ways can these measures help, given that ‘declarations’ and other conference instruments carry merely political rather than legal authority? One short answer to this question is that, precisely because legal and political processes are distinct, it is more likely that implementation will be secured if they result in mutually consistent messages, rather than in contradiction. In addition, however, both the Jomtien Declaration and the Dakar Framework – and the declarations from the other major United Nations conferences of the 1990s – provided some flesh for the rather minimalist bones of existing human rights legislation. They can thus be seen as not merely reconfirming a commitment to the treaties, but also as initiatives which go beyond them – sometimes substantially so. The human rights treaties themselves mainly focus on the provision of free and compulsory primary schooling and the elimination of gender inequalities throughout education. It is notable that these two aspects are taken up as Goals 3 and 4 of the Millennium Declaration and that they, in turn, comprise the second and fifth of the Dakar goals (Box 1.2). The MDG targets for education, however, are cautiously phrased – they omit mention of ‘free and compulsory’ primary schooling, and restrict themselves to seeking the elimination of gender disparities in education rather than to achieving the more demanding gender equality espoused by the Dakar Framework. In these respects these two goals are, in fact, rather less fully reflective of human rights commitments, as set out in the relevant treaties, than are the Dakar goals. Literacy is not mentioned in the MDGs, whereas there is a commitment to provide ‘fundamental education for those who have not completed primary education’ in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural, Rights (Article 13.2). This too is reflected in the Dakar Framework (Goal 4) which seeks a substantial improvement in literacy and in access to adult basic education. On the other hand, Dakar goes much further. In seeking to expand early childhood education (Goal 1), life skills programmes for all young people and adults (Goal 3) and an improvement in the quality of education at all levels (Goal 6), the Dakar Framework extends the agreed education, commitments beyond those that are implied by human rights treaties. Accordingly, this represents an extension of the agenda, rather than merely its reconfirmation.