The rights to Education

This area is responsible for promoting a culture of hospitality and inclusion, promoting spaces for meeting, welcome and friendship, understood in its connection and interdependence with other human rights.

Article 26

1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Education rights

The right to education is a fundamental right of all human beings that allows them to acquire knowledge and thus achieve a full social life. The right to education is vital for the economic, social and cultural development of all societies. However, it continues to be inaccessible to thousands of children around the world.

Education: an important learning

Education is the learning of various knowledge. It begins with the acquisition of basic knowledge, that is, literacy. In this phase, children learn to read and write thanks to primary education and parental support.

It is an essential stage that will allow the child to continue with their training and integrate into secondary and higher education.

Education favors the development of the child

Education also allows us to transmit common principles to new generations, thus preserving and perpetuating the values ​​of an entire society. Education is, therefore, a necessary learning that allows people to develop their personality and identity, as well as their physical and intellectual abilities. In this way, it contributes to their personal fulfillment by promoting social and professional integration. Thus, education contributes to improving people's quality of life. It offers disadvantaged adults and children a chance to escape poverty. It is, therefore, a fundamental tool for the economic, social and cultural development of all populations in the world.

Education must be accessible to all children

For the reasons given, education is a human right that must be accessible to all people, without any discrimination. International standards recognize the importance of the right to education and insist on the need to make primary education a right accessible to all children. Therefore, States must concentrate their efforts on primary education to make schools accessible and free for all children, thus allowing them to learn to read and write.

“Education for refugees, a worthwhile investment for the world”

It is also a fundamental right for all children that is affirmed in the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Refugee children do not have access to primary education facilities. Refugee children and adults do not have access to secondary public education or vocational training programs.

Right to Education in the new digital age

The right to education is a fundamental right included in the Charter of Human Rights and the Spanish Constitution. This right also transfers to the digital sphere. Education, like any other sector of activity, is also immersed in digitalization and transformation processes driven by technology and new models and ways of doing things in an increasingly digital world.

When we talk about digital education, we refer to the need for students to be trained in digital skills, but, necessarily, we must also talk about the digital skills that the teaching teams and the educational centers themselves must have. The necessary right to digital education to achieve these competencies, is expressly saying that: “the educational system will provide training, to guarantee the full insertion of students in the digital society and the learning of safe use of digital media, respectful of human dignity, constitutional values, fundamental rights and, particularly, with respect and guarantee of individual and collective privacy.”

The instruction is also included that, for this purpose, “the teachers will receive the digital skills and the necessary training”, as well as that in the study plans of the university degrees aimed at the professional performance of the teachers in the training of students, this training will be guaranteed. And finally, the following rule is added: the syllabi of selective tests for higher teaching bodies will incorporate “subjects related to the guarantee of digital rights and the protection of personal data.”

In our opinion, this novel regulation is more a declaration of intent than anything else and is totally insufficient, especially when this issue of new technologies is no longer new and could be seen coming at full speed. So much so, that the European Commission itself had been insisting on these issues for several years, until reaching a Digital Education Action Plan that includes a series of action priorities in the field of educational digitalization. The reasonable thing would have been for the incorporation of these digital rights into our system to have been done through its own law, but hey, it's something. I think that, at this point, no one can have any doubt that the educational system is going to need a profound reform.

It is clear that, to achieve this necessary change, syllabi and subjects will have to be designed that allow students to achieve digital skills throughout the educational process. But, obviously, first, this process must be followed by the teachers themselves and to do so, the Public Administrations will be obliged to modify the legislation that regulates the educational system, as well as to design groups of subjects that allow this process of change to be carried out. so deep, to achieve the necessary digital skills. Also to guarantee that the system allows the full insertion first of teachers and then of students, both in the digital society and in the technological evolutions that will undoubtedly continue to occur, something that, without a doubt, will require continued learning processes and not only in the academic period.

The entire educational system, both basic and university, must be updated so that, legally, the rights and duties of students are provided for and regulated, so that they are assured of both learning and the appropriate and safe use of the resources. digital media.

Today, it is clear that our teaching system still does not have those teachers of the future, technically well trained in the digital world and therefore, from now on, it is necessary for the system to start moving so that they can enhance these new skills. necessary to do their job well, skills that probably, in addition to the digital ones, have to involve teamwork, a lot of flexibility, and above all a permanent ability to learn new things and reinvent oneself from time to time, taking into account that new technologies They will continue to evolve at high speed.

The educational system faces a new and important challenge that, in addition to knowledge, will require attitude, proactivity and the capacity for permanent adaptation, elements that will be necessary to successfully achieve that digital education to which students now they have the right. This challenge will surely have to go through a digitalization process, in which it will be essential to invest in digital capabilities throughout life and not only in the training period as students.

Digitalization poses new challenges and therefore, students who join training cycles, if they do not receive adequate instruction, will find it difficult to compete in this new, rapidly evolving and definitely interconnected world. But right now, without going any further, not only young students, or adult teachers, but any citizen, we are exposed daily to enormous amounts of digital data, managed with algorithms that we do not know, exposure that generates obvious risks (cyberbullying, scams, revelation of secrets, computer sabotage, personality impersonations, threats, coercion, etc. etc.) and therefore, in this state of affairs, without further loss of time, regulated education will have to commit itself and thoroughly enter the environment digital.

In addition to all this, I would say that our educational system is not very interrelated with the labor market, a market with a high technological component, which at this time demands high digital skills. For this reason, it is clearly necessary that in addition to pure literacy, language or mathematics, necessary in all areas of our life, digital skills be introduced as at least basic and which should be included as core subjects in both basic education such as vocational training and university education.

The society of the future is going to have a marked digital character and this must be reflected in our educational system and in the teachings that must be taught. The educational system has faced a great challenge with the “right to digital education.”