Human Rights Day and the Future of Education: Old and New Challenges to Guaranteeing the Right to Education
On the occasion of Human Rights Day on 10 December 2025, Marina Avelar and Salomão Ximenes outline challenges to the right to education in the changing global context.
Launching the 2025 Human Rights Day campaign ahead of the 10 December celebration, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk remarked that “human rights are our compass in turbulent times – guiding and steadying us through uncertainty”. As the world marks 80 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the campaign underscores the declaration’s enduring relevance and its core principles of equality, justice, freedom, and dignity.
The Right to Education (RTE) is among the essential rights articulated in the UDHR. Alongside the rights to an adequate standard of living (Article 25), to freedom of opinion and expression (Article 19), and to rest and leisure (Article 24), the RTE is understood as foundational, both in its own terms and in enabling the realization of many other human rights.
Despite its fundamental importance, millions of children continue to be denied adequate schooling. As of 2023, an estimated 272 million children and youth worldwide remain out of school, a reduction of only 1% since 2015, when the international community adopted Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). The data also reveal stark inequalities, with exclusion disproportionately concentrated in low-income countries. UNESCO identifies chronic underinvestment in public education as a major obstacle, which also manifests in insufficient infrastructure, shortages of qualified teachers and adequate remuneration, and limited institutional capacity to withstand economic, demographic, or conflict-driven crises. As a result, the RTE remains largely unrealized for hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, undermining both individual life chances and the broader promise of universal, equitable, and quality education.
Beyond these long-standing limitations, new challenges have emerged in guaranteeing the RTE to all children, as definitions and monitoring approaches evolve in response to shifting social dynamics. While the international legal framework remains crucial, much has changed since its principles were first formulated. UNESCO’s “Initiative on the Evolving Right to Education,” building on its global reviews and processes such as the Transforming Education Summit, acknowledges this transformation. It highlights several areas in need of closer attention, including lifelong education, digital learning and the role of non-state actors, and the strengthening of protections for the most vulnerable groups.
The changing global context interacts with regional and local realities in particular ways. For instance, recent studies in Latin America show that the very notion of the RTE has been shifting under the influence of neoconservative policies aligned with ongoing neoliberal and managerial agendas (Saforcada & Ximenes, 2024). Although its manifestations vary across national and local contexts, it has demonstrated a profound capacity to reshape education policy. At its center lies a far-reaching redefinition of “freedom” and an insistence on the family, and thus the private sphere, as the primary authority in matters of education and morality. These shifts lay the groundwork for a new dogmatics of human rights in general and of the RTE in particular, reinforcing privatizing and segregationist schooling policies, expanding homeschooling, and tightening controls on curriculum and teachers’ work.
Most importantly, the reforms advanced by this new liberal–conservative alliance alter the terrain of political contestation. Whereas earlier disputes often opposed social groups defending the democratizing content of the human right to education against groups seeking to narrow its scope, what is now at stake is the substance of fundamental rights themselves. These rights are being contested and rewritten on new foundations. This dynamic has been described as “reactive juridification” (Vaggione, 2021), which over the past decade has become one of the most significant transnational fronts in the struggle over the meaning and content of the RTE in the region.
This evolving field of contestation, where transnational agendas and actors dispute the meaning of the RTE, has gained an additional layer of complexity in recent years, particularly in the wake of the social, cultural, political, and pedagogical impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital solutions such as platforms and apps have rapidly expanded in education under the banner of innovation and efficiency, often presented as mechanisms for guaranteeing the RTE.
Significant investments have been directed toward implementing new technologies, including data-driven AI models and educational platforms, frequently supported by rights-based arguments. These discourses can even echo Tomasevski’s well-known 4A’s framework, suggesting that technology can make education more available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable. Companies, philanthropies, and governments argue that digital tools can expand “access” for marginalized populations, enhance the “acceptability” of education by making it more relevant and engaging, and provide “personalized,” “adaptable” instruction capable of reducing inequalities.
Yet, the 2023 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report highlights the lack of evidence that digital technology improves the quality, equity, or inclusion of education. It reiterates that, alongside potential benefits, digital tools present significant risks to the RTE, risks that require far more empirical research (UNESCO, 2023).
Despite these warnings, diverse digitalization strategies continue to gain ground, often exploiting regulatory gaps or exerting pressure for changes in education legislation. Examples include the expansion of hybrid and distance learning within compulsory schooling, the incorporation of AI-related modules across all education levels, and the proliferation of platforms for classroom activities, administrative management, and even generative AI and big data analytics aimed at enhancing system-level decision-making.
Taken together, these developments reveal an increasingly complex landscape for the RTE — one shaped simultaneously by structural inequalities, shifting ideological projects, and rapid technological change. As Human Rights Day on 10 December invites us to revisit the UDHR’s foundational principles of equality, justice, freedom, and dignity, it also reminds us that realizing the RTE is indispensable to making these principles real. In the face of intensifying pressures that threaten to narrow, privatize, or technocratically reconfigure the right to education, renewed commitments are urgently needed from governments, international organizations, and civil society. Protecting the RTE today means reaffirming the broader human rights project and strengthening the democratic potential of public education for the decades to come.
The Authors:
Marina Avelar is a Professor at the Faculty of Education of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (FaE-UFMG). She is a researcher at the National Institute of Education Policy and Teachers’ Work (INCT Gestrado) and an advisor to NORRAG.
Salomão Ximenes is a Professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo (FE-USP) and at the Graduate Program of Public Policy at the Federal University of the ABC (PGPP-UFACB). He is also a researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (PQ-CNPQ).