Education as a Human Right in the 21st Century

According to the United Nations, education is a right to which all human beings are entitled. Since 2000, the UN has been promoting the Millennium Development Goal to achieve free universal primary education for all, regardless of gender, by 2015. If the UN is correct to suggest that education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights, then there is an important need to question the role that governments should play to support the institutional reforms necessary to achieve basic primary education for all. Moreover, there is an important need to question the role all individuals should play to ensure that the institutional structure dedicated to the provision of basic primary education is set up not only to provide children with access to a vague notion of education but to a notion of basic education that can provide children with the freedom to do something with that education once they have obtained it.