Education as a right: history, policy(ies) and challenges

Abstract

To affirm the right to education today seems, at first glance, almost obvious. Who would dare to question the idea that society as a whole has a right to be educated? Would there be any reason to discuss this principle, to deny this right to certain social sectors because of their capacities, economic or cultural conditions, or because they belong to a certain race, sex, ideological or religious conception? However, in this contribution I propose to argue that this conception had a long historical process of construction, that in that process the expansion of educational rights was clearly consolidated through public policies, in addition to the expansion of social demands, that this process was not linear and had in our country, At the time, there was a significant retraction of this right and now, as an effect of certain regulations and policies, but also as a consequence of social demands and mobilizations, there has been a movement towards its expansion, always threatened, not only by the action of sectors that oppose it, but also as an effect of practices that make it difficult to achieve it.