(Top: Left to Right) Twin sisters with mobility disabilities making their way to school in China.© 2009 Private; Girls from the Kalokol Girls Primary School fetch water from a dry riverbed to carry back to their school, which does not have access to running water. © 2014 Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for Human Rights Watch; Abdulmajid, 11, (left) and his brother Mohammed, 9, in Mersin, southern Turkey. In February 2015, they fled Syria with their family and have not attended school since 2012. © 2015 Stephanie Gee/Human Rights Watch
(Bottom: Left to Right) A 13-year-old boy, who mines gold, attends classes in a small-scale mining area in Mbeya Region. © 2013 Justin Purefoy for Human Rights Watch; Damaged school in Nikishine Rebel fighters deployed inside the school between September 2014 and February 2015 and exchanged intense fire with Ukrainian forces. © 2015 Yulia Gorbunova/Human Rights Watch; Sifola, age 13, stands in the home she shares with her husband and in-laws. © 2015 Omi for Human Rights Watch
Habib, a 7-year-old boy who has cerebral palsy, sits with his books at home in Sanaa. He previously attended a learning center for children with disabilities but when the war broke out, the center shut down.
© 2015 Hanan Alsurmi for Human Rights Watch Bibi, age 17, married at about age 11. After marrying, she was forced to quit school. Bibi said she returned to live with her parents because her husband physically abused her. A local village council would have to decide whether Bibi will return to her husband’s home. March 29, 2015.
© 2015 Omi for Human Rights Watch A 13-year-old boy, who mines gold, attends classes in a small-scale mining area in Mbeya Region. Work in mining impacts children’s performance and attendance at school.
© 2013 Justin Purefoy for Human Rights Watch Children from the Ghasiya tribe say they are called “dirty” and are discriminated against by the teachers and other students at a primary school in Sonbhadra district, Uttar Pradesh. All children from the tribe are enrolled in the same grade and sit in the same classroom irrespective of their ages
© 2013 Jayshree Bajoria/Human Rights Watch A young boy sitting on the floor of a daycare center, playing with a camera. Suraj, a 9-year-old boy with a physical disability, does not attend school because his parents thought that no school would admit him. He recently started attending a nearby daycare center for children with intellectual disabilities. Our research found that Nepal and its international partners are not doing enough to ensure that children with disabilities are attending school and that the education system is inclusive, accessible, appropriate, and of good quality for children with disabilities.
© 2011 Shantha Rau Barriga/Human Rights Watch A group of girls, ages 10 to 15, in an orphanage for children with disabilities in northwest Russia. Many children in “specialized” orphanages spend their days seated in rooms with minimal attention from staff, who often lack training and other resources to engage children in activities appropriate to their ages and disabilities.
© 2013 Andrea Mazzarino/ Human Rights Watch Twin sisters with mobility disabilities making their way to school in China.
© 2009 Private Jacinta, 15, was excluded from school after authorities found out that she was pregnant. She said her teachers took her to a medical clinic to undergo a pregnancy test. She subsequently gave birth prematurely and her baby did not survive. August 5, 2014.
© 2014 Marcus Bleasdale/VII for Human Rights Watch A 20-year-old Japanese woman who was bullied by her classmates in junior high school holds a notebook displaying the message: “It was common knowledge that I was being bullied. It was also common knowledge that my teachers would never help me.”
© 2015 Kyle Knight/Human Rights Watch Mariam (pseudonym), 15, from Ghouta, Syria engaged to a Syrian man, aged 20, shows her engagement ring, in Amman, Jordan. She dropped out of 7th grade. In 2011, 12 percent of registered marriages in Syrian refugee communities in Jordan involved a girl under the age of 18. This had increased to 31.7 percent in the first quarter of 2014.
© 2015 Elin Martínez/Human Rights Watch A broken-down and unused government tubewell in a school playground. When Human Rights Watch visited Iruain in July 2015, the village was without any government-installed functioning and publicly accessible water points. Iruain (Laksam Upazila in Comilla District), Bangladesh. March 6, 2016
© 2016 Atiah Saha/Human Rights Watch Damaged school in Nikishine Rebel fighters deployed inside the school between September 2014 and February 2015 and exchanged intense fire with Ukrainian forces.
© 2015 Yulia Gorbunova/Human Rights Watch Internally displaced children attending classes at a displacement camp in Maiduguri, Borno state, September 2015.
© 2015 Bede Sheppard/Human Rights Watch. “Albert,” 16, works at an underwater mining site in the Philippines .
© 2014, Mark Z Saludes for Human Rights Watch This open-air shack in Saint-Louis, a town in northern Senegal, serves as a so-called “Quranic school,” a typical example of the inhumane conditions in many such schools.
© 2014 Andrew Oberstadt/Human Rights Watch Israeli border police arresting Ahmad Abu Sbitan, 11, in front of his school in East Jerusalem. The police accused him of throwing a stone at them.
© 2015 Majd Gaith Damage at the Jabalya girls school on July 30, 2014, after an Israeli attack killed 20 people, including three children.
© 2014 Anne Paq/Human Rights Watch Girls from the Kalokol Girls Primary School fetch water from a dry riverbed to carry back to their school, which does not have access to running water. Nearby Lake Turkana is too saline for human consumption. Women and girls often walk extremely long distances to dig for water in dry riverbeds, exposing them to physical danger and taking time away from their studies. As climate variability increases, women are having to walk further and dig deeper to access potable water.
© 2014 Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for Human Rights Watch. An exhausted child cries on the railway tracks between Serbia and Hungary as night falls, and her family argues nearby whether to cross into Hungary and face temporary detention.
© 2015 ZALMAÏ for Human Rights Watch Rawan, 14, holds the certificate she received upon completing the 4th grade at a Syrian temporary education center in Istanbul. She missed nearly four years of school prior to her enrollment in January 2015.
© 2015 Stephanie Kim Gee/Human Rights Watch
Today, the global community marks the first International Day of Education .
For students, teachers, and organizations that support children’s right to education, it’s been a long time coming. Since the 1990s, activists have mobilized to try and ensure education gets more attention globally and nationally. The United Nations hopes to use this day to highlight education’s fundamental and transformative contributions towards peace and sustainable development . It is also important to highlight that the international community has not provided sufficient or consistent global and national financing, or consistently tackled all barriers , to ensure all children benefit from a good, inclusive education.
Ironically, education is one of the basic human rights that global leaders frequently talk about. At Davos , the United Nations General Assembly, and G20 meetings , heads of state, government ministers, and UN agency experts widely agree that countries cannot develop without quality education for all. Many speak movingly of how education transformed their own lives.
If personal accounts of education’s importance translated into action, many of the problems and inequalities within education would have already been addressed. Yet, today’s education deficit – the tremendous gap between government’s international obligations to deliver on the right to education and what children actually experience in their local communities – shows that many challenges lay ahead.
Millions of children around the world should not continue to experience a complete denial of their right to education. Among them, millions of children with disabilities who are told there is no school for them, refugee children who are made to wait for years before host governments grant them adequate school access, children whose schools have been bombed or taken over by military forces during war , and children from minority backgrounds who are deprived of a quality education in their communities.
The right to education deserves more than one day. Let’s work to make 2019 the year education becomes a reality for millions more children around the world.
