The State of the right to education worldwide – Free or fee: 2006 Global report

Primary education is the focus of the report because the original reasons for declaring it to be each child’s birthright remain unchanged. Eighty years ago, the rule that governments should make education free and compulsory had been extrapolated from the practice of the industrialized countries and adopted by ‘the international community’ of the time, which thereby laid down an excellent strategy against child labour. That model was carried into the universally guaranteed right to education, which the United Nations had loudly proclaimed and then quietly betrayed.