New Globalex Research Guide on Human Right to Education

GlobaLex, a very good electronic collection created by the Hauser Global Law School Program at the New York University School of Law, has published a new guide on Human Right to Education Research:

"Until the early twentieth century, education was a privilege only allowed to certain classes of a society. While some countries such as Germany tried to enlighten the general public as well by starting mandatory public education in the eighteenth century, this existed only by law and was not fully implemented. To make it worse, states indoctrinate authoritarian ideas through education, a problem which international law could not effectively regulate because they could not pierce sovereigns in human rights issues before the United Nations Charter and 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which specifically provides a human right to education under Article 26 (...) To have a better understanding of the right to education, there is no choice but to get its definition from international law, especially human rights instruments, which provides a more consistent approach to the right to education among states and better protection to humans around the world. Laws from other foreign countries and their implementation of human rights principles should also be considered in order to understand the right to education."

"Numerous international instruments, articles, treatises, and national laws relating to the human right to education have been drafted and published since World War II. International law has been used to pierce state sovereignty to protect a state’s citizens against the abusive use of state powers. Accordingly, research in this field to protect the human right to education has become diversified, complicated, and interdisciplinary. Research has focused on outcomes or contexts of education, applying a wide variety of theories including human capital theories, theories of consciousness-raising, and Neo-Weberian and non-Marxist theories. Further, international instruments should be considered holistically, including treaties, international custom, general principles of law, cases, and soft law from various intergovernmental and nongovernmental organization reports and documents. Domestic laws, including state law and local ordinances, should also be considered because the legal right to education is applied and implemented differently among different states."

"Considering a wide variety of international instruments and literature relating to the human right to education, this guide provides an annotated bibliography of journal articles, treatises, reports, and documents available online to facilitate the research of scholars and practitioners in this field. It also includes a list of primary source instruments with domestic laws of selective countries."