Primary School Children cannot form a political party, get elected to parliament and secure budgetary allocations for their education. The proportion of children in the northern part of the world is small and their parents can secure funding for education, combining their political voice with paying tax. In many developing countries, children constitute the majority of the population but obtain a vote after becoming adults; hence they have to rely on their parents and their teachers. Few of their parents pay tax, many because they earn too little and their vote seldom affects budgetary allocations because there often in simply too little to distribute. Their teachers habitually have to battle to get their rights recognized and their salaries paid so that they could teach. Children thus need to have their right to education fully recognized, and this right necessarily goes beyond national and regional borders. There can be no universal right to education unless the corresponding governmental obligations - both individual and collective - are also universal.

The global commitment to education as a right has recently weakens and if may disappear altogether unless public pressure remedies the collective reluctance of governments to accept their human rights obligations. The collective voice of governments is supportive to education. The main reason is avoidance of corollary duties and responsibilities.

The right to education entails governmental obligations on two levels; domestic and global. Individual states are held responsible for ensuring that human rights are effectively safeguarded, but global economic and fiscal policies can constrain both the ability and the willingness of individual governments to guarantee the right to education. The identification and elimination of obstacles - especially financial - to the realization of the right to education is the key to redressing the increasing substitution of governmental human rights obligations by the market logic.

The collective voice of governments continues promising education for all, but references to the right to education are becoming conspicuously absent. The difference between education and the right to education is epitomized in post-war history. An international commitment to universal primary education for all children in the world was made once per decade. Each betrayed pledge was followed by a similar pledge, which was also betrayed. Human rights were invented to prevent betrayals of political commitments by translating them into legal obligations. Thus, education as a universal human right entails corresponding obligations for all governments and the right to challenge its denial and violations. Human rights are defined as governmental obligations because they do not materialize spontaneously though the interplay of market forces or charity The mobilizing power of saying that a betrayed pledge is a

human rights violation is immense and legal enforcement of human rights obligations makes violations expensive - governments have to remedy them, compensate the victims, and ensure that similar violations never happen again. Resort to legal enforcement requires existing individual and collective commitments to the right to education which is increasingly avoided.

The turn of the millennium has been marked by attempts to forge consensus within the international community on diagnosing problems and devising solutions. Ten years after the Jomtien Conference in 1990 had instilled optimism by forging a set of global commitments, the Fourth Global Meeting of the International Consultative Forum on Education for all took place in Dakar on 26 - 28 April 2000. That meeting was dubbed Jomtein+10 in popular parlance, because it was based on the acknowledgement that commitments made at Jomtein in 1990 had not been met. The 1990 commitment had been to achieve universal primary education by year 2000; the target year was subsequently postponed to 2015. Nothing could be done to challenge that betrayal because no mechanism had been established to hold those making promises accountable to their performance - or the lack thereof. No significant improvement was achieved in the year 2000. The final document resulting from the Dakar Forum repeated the same noble ends but failed to specify the means needed to attain them, as well as the mechanisms necessary to challenge failures to attain the agreed ends. The collective voice of inter-governmental agencies and governments confined itself to defining goals - asking others to deliver them.

The key formulation of Jomtein, pledging that "every person - child, youth, adult - shall be able to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meed their basic learning needs," was repeated ten years later in Dakar: "all children, young people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs." There was silence on the corresponding governmental obligations; there was silence on the fate of education in resource allocation - from global to local. In September 2000, the Millennium Declaration affirmed the target year 2015 for all children to complete primary schooling, without mentioning how that goal would be attained. There was no mention of governmental obligations, and this time not even of the right to education.

This unanimity about the goal for all children to complete primary education reduces the global targets to the first phase of schooling, thereby negating the right to secondary and university education. These are, indeed, at risk of becoming fully transformed into services that sold and purchased against a price. Moreover, retrogression affects even primary education. The 1990 Jomtien Conference was convened against the diminishing coverage of primary education, especially in Africa, where the population of the primary-school age population in school had declined by 10% in the 1980's. A similar process of retrogression has subsequently taken place in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Between 1989 and 1997, educational enrollment of 15-year olds diminished by 20% or more in Georgia, Moldavia or Tajikistan. The causes have been similar - diminished ability of the state to generate revenue and to finance all-encompassing and free-of-charge primary education, thereby replacing the right to education which is governed by the purchasing power of families, communities and communities.

Rather than focussing on the necessity to affirm and reinforce universal universal governmental human rights obligations, the current global strategies abundantly use the term partnership to depict relations between donors and recipients, creditors and debtors, governments and NGOs. Partnership does not reflect the relationship between a creditor or (donor) holding a chequebook and a government which desperately needs that cheque, nor does it fit a truism shared amongst human rights NGOs whereby one cannot do human rights work and be popular with governments. Human rights are safeguards against abuse or power and require the identification of those who hold power, so as to be able to prevent and remedy its abuse.

As adults, we have the power of affirming or negating the children's right to education. We can accept that children can have rights only if we comply with our individual and collective duties. Governmental human rights obligations are based upon the premise of governments - individually collectively - funding public services, which implies their ability and willingness to raise revenue and accord priority to human rights in its distribution. Domestically, solidarity is enforced through the duty to pay tax from which education is financed. Lower taxes may seem popular until they translate into ruined public schools, whereupon the voters' anger will alter governmental policies or turn into apathy and cynicism if generation and distribution of revenue is beyond their reach. Globally, the universality of the right to education is predicated on international co-operation, so as to equalize opportunities for the enjoyment of the right to education by supplementing the insufficient resources of poor countries. Constantly diminishing aid jeopardizes the universality of the right to education, thus challenging the very human in the definition of human rights. Human rights activism emerged in the 1960s with the slogan that people whose rights were protected should act for those who were less fortunate; exposing denials and violations of human rights was seen as the first step towards opposing them.

What is needed today is globalization of human rights activism in education. The adjective human implies everybody's duty to defend the rights of all fellow humans so that denials of the right to education cannot continue un-exposed and un-opposed.

QUALIFIED TEACHERS FOR QUALITY EDUCATION

The inauguration of World Teachers' Day by the International Conference on Education in Geneva in 1993 marks the modern realisation of the important role teachers of teachers in society. On October 5, we annually commemorate that recognition by celebrating the contribution of teachers.

Today over 100 countries observe World Teachers' Day. The efforts of EI and EI member organisations have contributed to this wide spread recognition. Over the past eight years, EI has launched major efforts to promote the contribution and status of teachers through World Teachers' Day.

EI's on-going campaign (supported by UNESCO) for the issuing of commemorative stamps of World Teachers' Day, helped launch 20 commemorative WTD stamps from six countries.

Chosen jointly by Education International and UNESCO, the slogan for this World Teachers' Day is, "Qualified Teachers for Quality Education". It encompasses the dual themes of teachers as indispensable to providing quality education and teachers as fundamental in helping governments meet their commitments to the follow up of recent world conferences in education (i.e. Dakar Forum, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education).

This year's focus on quality in education indirectly recognises the importance of education and that every discussion on quality has to relate to teachers. Education is to a large extent a matter of a learning process, which takes place through the interaction between teacher and student. When this process works well, real learning takes place. The clear conclusion is that quality education requires quality teachers. This highlights the significance of acknowledging teaching as a profession, rather than as something anyone can do. To provide high quality education as everyone hopes to, there is obvious need to attract the best students to teacher education and to maintain qualified teachers in the education system.

Increasingly teacher organisations must focus on quality education in order to protect and to improve the situation of their members. The question is how quality education can become an integral part of teacher unions' strategy.

Union strategy should clearly establish the link between the investment made in education and the quality you get. Quality can only be achieved through increasing resources allocated to education. For governments to achieve quality, they must realise the investment required. But it is not enough just to invest in education, it is also crucial to make the right investments.

The professional freedom of teachers is of crucial importance in developing quality in education. Professional freedom does not mean that the teacher can do whatever he or she likes, but that the teacher, who knows the students, is the person best equipped to decide which methods to use in order to create an optimal learning situation.

Teachers' working conditions are also closely related to their students' learning conditions. A school environment allowing teachers to do a good job will automatically improve the learning conditions of the students.

Reviews of the factors affecting academic achievement of school children conclude that the education level of the teacher is of great influence. The significance of improving teacher education and the importance of teacher qualification and training cannot be overemphasised.

Continuous professional development is invaluable to maintaining the level of teachers' education, retaining them in the profession and avoiding 'burn-out'. To improve the quality of education, teachers must be supported in their efforts to develop themselves professionally.

Important issues such as environmental problems, AIDS/HIV, violence, the growing threats against democracy through increasing racism and xenophobia must be reflected in today's education.