ABSTRACT
It is widely believed that there is a universal right to education. While one might expect that a right of such evident importance would have been the subject of careful philosophical analysis, this turns out not to be the case at all. The text of the Declaration of Human Rights, which in Article 26 declares that 'everyone has a right to education' does not give any indication of what the basis of the right to education is held to be; and a survey of the philosophical and legal literature dealing with human rights reveals that there have been almost no serious attempts to show just what is implied in the existence of a universal human right to education or what rational justification there can be for the assertion that there is in fact such a right. Appeals to a right to education are, of course, frequent; but they typically serve to express a moral or social claim for which an adequate and perhaps even self-evident rational basis is simply assumed to exist. Self-evidence is, however, as unhelpful a notion in these contexts as it is in most others; and an effort to provide a philosophical analysis of the right to education is long overdue. This paper is a contribution to such an effort which will, I hope, increasingly engage the interest of philosophers.
