Academic Freedom 3: Education and Human Rights

WUS, 1995, 127 Seiten, engl.

The reports in this book give a picture of educational systems from a human rights perspective. The fundamental right to education is generally regarded as being a cultural right, one of a group that includes the rights to take part in cultural life, the freedom to engage in scientific research, the right to creative activity and the right to intellectual property. In international legal practice the right to education contains three elements: the right to teach, the right to receive education, and the freedom of choice of education. With respect to higher education, international instruments point out that it shall be ‘equally accessible to all on the basis of merit’.

Initiatives by organizations of academics, particularly in the South, to conceptualize academic freedom have placed it among educational rights and have thus stressed the socio-economic context. Increasingly, a link is being made between the introduction of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the availability, accessibility and quality of education. Cuts in national education budgets and privatization of educational institutions provoked in several parts of the world a call to guarantee academic freedom and university autonomy.

This book seeks to contribute to the debate by showing that it is not lack of resources alone that impede educational rights. Restrictions on freedom of expression, religious intolerance and ethnic or gender-based discrimination are threatening forces, felt at all levels of education in a growing number of countries.