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IV. Discrimination and Lack of Access 

On nearly every continent, Human Rights Watch has found that children suffer discrimination in gaining access to education, based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or other status. Our investigations in countries that include Colombia, Guinea, India, Israel, Mexico, Spain, South Africa, and Sri Lanka found that migrant children, children from rural areas, ethnic or religious minorities, internally displaced, indigenous children, and Dalit or low-caste children were often denied equal access to education, or in some cases, access to any education at all. For children in detention, opportunities for education are often grossly deficient.

As discussed throughout this document and in a separate concluding section, girls face particular challenges and are disproportionately denied their right to education.

Rural and Indigenous Children

In Mexico, Human Rights Watch found that many indigenous children have no possibility of attending school.⁵⁸  We interviewed parents and local leaders from thirteen Mixteco communities in the municipality of Metlatónoc, Guerrero, who reported that there were no primary school teachers where they lived. In most of these communities, the children have never attended school. As a result, they are illiterate and have very poor command of the Spanish language. Each of the communities reported having twenty or more primary school age children, enough under Mexican law to warrant a school. The nearest functioning school for most of them was an hour or more away.

In another twelve indigenous communities in La Montaña, Guerrero, we interviewed teachers who reported that their schools did not have enough teachers to cover the number of students enrolled. As a result, each teacher was required to handle forty or more students in half of the schools, and over thirty in the other half. In several schools, teachers were required to teach all six grades simultaneously—an arrangement which,  according to both teachers and students, made meaningful academic progress extremely difficult. One girl in the community of Costa Rica, Guerrero, described her experience in a school with over sixty students and just one teacher: “We can’t learn much, since the teacher is always busy with other students.” 

In rural South Africa, farm schools—public schools on private property—remain the only available source of primary education for tens of thousands of children living on commercial farms.⁵⁹  These schools make up 13 percent of all state-funded schools, but are among the poorest in financial resources, physical structure and quality in South Africa. Farm children may attend schools without electricity, drinking water, sanitation, suitable buildings, or adequate learning materials.

These schools are a legacy from the apartheid era, when farm owners established the schools to keep children of workers occupied by providing a basic, limited education while their parents worked on the farm. Although the present government is committed to converting the schools to ordinary government-managed public schools with limited farm owner responsibility, Human Rights Watch found cases where landowners actively blocked access to schools or frustrated their functioning by suspending the water supply or closing off short routes to school.

One teacher in Free State Province told Human Rights Watch, “There are many problems at this school. Sometimes we can’t hold classes because the farm manager locks the main gate allowing no public access. The pupils can only attend class by entering onto the school premises through a hole in the fence.”

Lack of easy access to the schools also forces many children to travel long journeys on foot. For example, two-thirds of the children—some as young as eight—attending one of the farm schools visited by Human Rights Watch traveled up to thirty kilometers on foot each morning to school. Fatigue and exhaustion adversely affect these and many other children’s ability to learn. Children are also exposed to dangers such as sexual assault and road accidents when walking to and from school.

The consequences of the farm school system in South Africa are high drop out rates, low enrollment, and irregular attendance in the rural areas. A national report published in 2000 found that about 19 percent of children in rural areas, which include commercial farm areas and former homelands, were not in school, as opposed to 11 percent in urban areas.

Internally Displaced and Migrant Children

A Human Rights Watch investigation in July and August 2004 found that internally children in Colombia face significant hurdles in continuing their education.⁶⁰ In many cases, there is simply no space available, despite legal provisions that require state schools to enroll displaced children who arrive in their communities.

Internally displaced children in Colombia are far more likely than children in the general population not to attend school. When the Colombian ombudsman’s office analyzed Ministry of Education data for 2002, for example, it found that in twenty-one receiving areas, only 10,700 of the 122,200 displaced children of school age—or 8.8 percent—were enrolled in school. The enrollment rate for all children of school age in those communities was 92.7 percent.⁶¹ Similarly, in its survey of displaced populations in six departments, the International Organization for Migration found that 52 percent of displaced youths between the ages of twelve and eighteen were not in school. In comparison, only 25 percent of youths of the same age range in Colombia’s population as a whole was out of school, according to National Administrative Statistics Department data.⁶²

The need to flee their communities has already interrupted the education of many internally displaced children. As a result of missed schooling, many have already fallen behind when they try to resume their education. However, many schools will not admit children who are in a grade lower than usual for their age. School authorities prefer to allocate limited spaces to children who are in the target age range for their grade, although Colombia’s Constitutional Court clarified in 2004 that age is not a permissible factor to deny admission to school.⁶³

In Sri Lanka, two decades of civil conflict created more than 800,000 internally displaced people (IDPs), including 220,000 children displaced in the North and East. Eighty-five percent of displaced children are Tamil, an ethnic group that constitutes 18 percent of the Sri Lankan population and is concentrated in the North and East.  An additional 16,000 Muslim children have also been displaced from the North. ⁶⁴  

Obstacles to education for internally displaced children in Sri Lanka include poverty, which renders school supplies and uniforms unaffordable and which forces children into the workforce; unavailability of schools in the vicinity of welfare centers; overcrowding in schools; and shortages in teaching staff and the misallocation of available teachers.⁶⁵   Although Sri Lanka boasts a primary school enrolment rate as high as 97 percent,⁶⁶ in 2003 an estimated 50,000 children were out of school in the North and East, with a drop-out rate of 15 percent — nearly four times the national average.⁶⁷ In this regard, IDP children were significantly affected, with 25 percent not in school.

In February 2002, the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) signed a ceasefire agreement. By March 2005, 383,990 IDPs had returned to their previous homes.⁶⁸  Returning home, however, has not guaranteed a proper education for former IDP children.  The frequent interruptions to their education and often traumatic circumstances leading to such interruptions have caused many to fall behind.  According to a former principal interviewed by Human Rights Watch, displacement and interruptions in schooling have caused many children to be “slow learners” whose teachers lack the resources, capacity and will to address their needs.  Instead, these children are either held back a grade or passed on without qualification, further discouraging them from staying in school, and accounting for almost a quarter of sixth graders being illiterate.⁶⁹

The return of IDP children in Sri Lanka poses unique demands, both in the substantive care and attention they need as well as the increases in student enrolment their return entails.  Unfortunately, these demands cannot be provided by existing educational facilities in the North and East, which were occupied or damaged during the conflict⁷⁰ and which have not been adequately rebuilt: at the signing of the ceasefire agreement in 2002, the North and East accounted for 54 percent of all temporarily closed schools in the country; a year later, they still accounted for more than 50 percent of non-functioning schools.⁷¹ These infrastructural inadequacies are exacerbated by the shortages of qualified teaching staff, who were displaced, transferred to other parts of the country, or who have left the profession altogether.  Nationwide, with an average teacher-student ratio of 1:20, there is no teacher shortage⁷²; in the North and East, however, an immediate shortage of 4,650 Tamil medium teachers and of 240 Sinhala medium teachers has been identified, with an additional four thousand to five thousand teachers needed in the medium term to cope with increased enrolment.⁷³  These shortages have been exacerbated by poor information about student concentrations and needs, meaning that those teachers available are often mis-allocated.⁷⁴

Migrant children are also less likely to be in school than other children. In Spain, national law provides for compulsory education for children age six to sixteen, including foreign children. Yet a 2001 Human Rights Watch investigation found that the vast majority of unaccompanied migrant children in Ceuta and many children in Melilla—two Spanish cities on the North African coast—were not enrolled in school.⁷⁵  The government rarely integrated unaccompanied children into Spanish schools, relying instead on staff at residential centers for such children to provide basic education. Residential centers, however, often arbitrarily denied children even this level of education.

A fourteen-year-old boy in Ceuta told Human Rights Watch, “I wanted to go to school and learn Spanish but they wouldn’t let me. Other kids went, but not me. I went to the director to ask to go to school but it didn’t help.”

Ethnicity, Race, Caste, and Religion

In India, Dalit—or so-called untouchable—and low-caste children routinely face discrimination in education.⁷⁶  Most of the government schools in which Dalit students are enrolled, where they exist at all, are deficient in basic infrastructure, classrooms, teachers and teaching aids. Dalit students often sit at the back of the class and are often treated badly by upper-caste teachers and staff. A majority of Dalit students are also enrolled in vernacular schools whose students suffer serious disadvantages in the job market as compared to those who learn in English-speaking schools.

Documented discriminatory practices against Dalit children in schools in the state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, include discrimination against Dalit settlements in the location of schools; teachers avoiding physical contact with Dalit and low-caste children; children from particular castes being special targets of verbal abuse and physical punishment by the teachers; and low-caste and Dalit children frequently being beaten by high-caste classmates.⁷⁷

Discrimination combined with low returns on education, including discrimination in employment, encourages Dalit children to drop out of school; Dalit children drop out of school at a much higher rate than non-Dalits, and there is a higher rate of illiteracy among Dalits than among non-Dalits.

In Israel, nearly one quarter of all schoolchildren attend a separate and parallel public school system. The children in this parallel school system are Israeli citizens of Palestinian Arab origin. Often overcrowded and understaffed, poorly built, badly maintained, or sometimes unavailable, these schools offer fewer facilities and educational opportunities than are offered Israel’s majority Jewish population.⁷⁸

The Israeli education ministry spends less per student in the Arab system than in the Jewish school system. Palestinian Arab children attend schools with larger classes and fewer teachers than do those in the Jewish school system, with some children having to travel long distances to reach the nearest school. Some Arab schools lack basic learning facilities like libraries, computers, science laboratories, and recreation space. Palestinian Arab children with disabilities are particularly marginalized.

The consequences of this discrimination are that compared with Jewish students, Palestinian Arab students drop out of school at three times the rate of Jewish students and are less likely to pass the national matriculation examinations. Only a handful ever make it to university.

Children in Detention

Brazil’s national juvenile justice law, contained in the Statute of the Child and the Adolescent, is among the most progressive in Latin America, and guarantees children in detention the right to education and vocational training, among other rights. In reality, however, opportunities for education in Brazil’s detention facilities are often grossly deficient.  In investigations of seventeen juvenile detention facilities in Northern Brazil in 2002, and five detention centers in Rio de Janeiro in 2003 and 2005, Human Rights Watch found that many detained children received no education whatsoever.⁷⁹

Children and their parents frequently identified education as one of the greatest needs of Rio de Janeiro’s juvenile detention system. One detained youth said, “Sometimes we have classes, and sometimes we don’t have them.” A volunteer working in the detention centers said, “Education is a chaos.” A number of children indicated that they had attended school regularly prior to their arrest, but had been unable to continue classes once detained.

In January 2005, authorities in Santo Expedito and Padre Severino suspended classes, citing security concerns related to understaffing. Schools remained closed until at least May 14, 2005.

The majority of children in detention in Brazil’s northern states have only completed between one and four years of primary education. Many are illiterate. Access to schooling would be particularly beneficial for these children. But we found that in some facilities, no classes were offered, while in other centers, some children received schooling while others did not. DamiÃo, who had been in the fourth year of primary school before he was detained, reported that “From the time I entered [the center], I haven’t studied.” He had been detained for two months. Lucas similarly told us, “I’ve spent a month in this place. I’m not studying.”

In Pakistan, more than 4,500 children may be detained at any given time for being in conflict with the law.⁸⁰ The majority have not been convicted of any offense, but are awaiting the conclusion of their trials, a process that can take months or years. In visits to detention facilities in Punjab Province in 1998, Human Rights Watch found that for most, educational opportunities while in detention were severely limited.⁸¹  Religious instruction was often prioritized, while in some facilities, no secular instruction was provided at all. Under the Pakistan Prison Rules, the provision of secular education is required only for convicts, who form a very small proportion of the juvenile population. Staffing is often insufficient, teaching aids are often non-existent, and in one facility, educated adult prisoners were assigned to teach juveniles.

A report from the Pakistan Law Commission found that “in fact no proper and organized system for imparting education to [the] prisoner exists,” and recommended that every jail establish facilities and provide qualified teachers and reading material for detainees.⁸²

In the United States, the majority of states have passed laws making it easier for children to be tried as adults and detained in adult facilities. In Maryland and California, Human Rights Watch found that the education provided to children in adult facilities is seriously deficient. One Maryland facility provided no schooling whatsoever, while in other jails, we found that the number of hours of classroom instruction frequently fell far short of the requirements of federal and state law.⁸³

Brian, a sixteen-year-old in a facility with no educational opportunities, told Human Rights Watch, “I’d rather get schooling in my head than just be sitting here.” Michael said, “We don’t have no school here. I just read every day, and we play Scrabble. We look up the words in the dictionary and read the definitions. We don’t have no one who comes up here and sits down and teaches us.”

In Los Angeles, Human Rights Watch found in 2003 that children held at the Men’s Central Jail were locked in windowless single cells for twenty-three and a half hours each day. They received no classroom instruction; instead, children saw a teacher for five to fifteen minutes each through their cell bars two to three times a week. Jail staff told Human Rights Watch that state education law required only one hour of face-to-face instruction per week, but the jail did not even meet that minimal requirement.⁸⁴

The Center on Crimes, Communities and Culture reports: “In most cases, once juveniles are incarcerated, even for a short time, their line to education is forever broken. Most juvenile offenders aged sixteen and older do not return to school upon release or graduate from high school.”⁸⁵ For many children, the interruption of their schooling comes at a time when they are statistically most likely to drop out. The practice of offering detained children substandard education—or in some cases no education at all—denies children most as risk of delinquency a critical resource that can assist them to assume socially constructive and productive roles in society.

Recommendations

• Governments should enact and enforce national legislation prohibiting discrimination in education against children because of their race, ethnicity, gender, social or other status. Protections from discrimination should include mechanisms for victims and their guardians to lodge complaints and receive rapid redress; these mechanisms should be publicly communicated.

• Governments should allocate education resources to ensure that underserved populations, including particularly vulnerable children, have equal access to education. This may entail building additional schools in these areas and allocating additional teachers.

• Governments should ensure that education resources are allocated to ensure that all schools are funded on a non-discriminatory basis, and where necessary, allocate additional resources to close existing gaps, including the physical condition of school buildings, additional educational facilities or equipment, and teacher training.

• Ministries of Education should develop concrete plans and mechanisms to identify and reach out to populations of children that are underserved by the education system. Such mechanisms could include a special office or unit to focus on effective strategies for ensuring that these groups have equal access to schooling.

• Governments should ratify the 1960 Convention Against Discrimination in Education.

• Governments should ensure that every child in detention receives an education suited to his or her needs and abilities and designed to prepare him or her for return to society and entry into the work force.

• Governments should work with educational authorities to ensure that education provided in juvenile detention centers is recognized by schools outside of the detention system so that children may continue their education in regular schools once they have completed their sentences or been released.