A View of the Right to Education: Equality, Justice and Futures

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the notion of the “right to education” as a historical, political, and situated construct, contested and influenced by structural conditions of inequality. From a perspective that articulates contributions from critical pedagogy and philosophy, it problematizes the ways in which certain discourses tend to restrict and fix the meaning of fundamental concepts that give substance to the right to education, such as the notions of equality and justice. Within this framework, it raises the need to restore a perspective that recognizes experience, fragility, singularity, and difference as constitutive dimensions of the subject of education and of the school as a potential space for democratic construction. It proposes understanding the right to education not as a set of fixed normative meanings, but as a political commitment activated in specific educational situations, through the construction of ethical and emotional bonds that sustain it as a horizon of social transformation.