ABSTRACT
It is a trite piece of wisdom to say that education is a controversial subject. Such controversy in education anywhere continually reflects social unrest caused by social change and problems of economic development. Every kind of educational administration faces conflicts and the law and courts are looked upon as problem-solving mechanisms. Many state constitutions give the aims of education and make provisions for the organization and administration of education with a view to attaining these aims. A variety of state constitutions exist: the centralized, the decentralized, the theocratic, the secular, and those that suit a ruling family or a single ruler or there might even be a mixture of these. For instance, Germany has a highly centralized system within a pronounced decentralized national educational framework. Some countries provide judicial protection to their citizens’ individual rights while others forbid their courts from intervening in educational matters by law, for example, by depending on their constitution or by tradition. Teachers everywhere, especially secondary school teachers, wish to exercise academic freedom as this is understood in universities in matters dealing with freedom to lecture and do research. Students and their parents fight to retain their rights or, if lost or curtailed, desire these rights to be restored. Some school laws protect or prescribe the rights of students, of their parents and those of teachers and as a result restrict or proscribe administrative educational action. The legalization of education, which has now come to mean courts’ sanctioning of educational laws, in contrast to legalizing, which means made lawful by the legislature, or the law of education in gestation or in the making, appears to be going on currently in various countries. Legalization simply means judicial review of statutory education law, for which provision obtains based on the law of any modern state. Not all sovereign states allow or even tolerate judicial review of educational litigation between the legislature and the public, let alone individual citizens. This is mainly because the genuine separation of powers does not obtain in them-the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. Dictatorships in history have invariably used the curriculum to further the dictator’s ideology. The first thing any occupying power does is to close the schools and universities of the defeated country and then reintroduce their brand of curriculum, based on their own laws, through the administration of the occupied country.
