How can we realise the right to free education for all children?

Ensuring that all children can access education of reasonable quality for free is a difficult task. Any right that guarantees people a good or service for free creates questions about provision and payment. Understanding what a right to free education actually means reveals why fulfilling it is more complex than it appears. A right is a claim that creates a corresponding duty on others. Some rights, like the right to one’s property, require others to refrain from taking what is yours. These types of rights are called negative rights. Other rights, like the right to education, are positive rights and require someone to provide you with something proactively. This distinction matters because positive rights impose costs that negative rights do not. Someone must actively provide the service and bear the expense.

The government typically fulfils this duty using taxpayer money. We all incur the cost when the government takes this responsibility. Even the beneficiaries of such free services pay for them via indirect taxes. Nothing is truly free.

When people refer to the right to education, they typically mean the right to access schooling. One can seek education anywhere: at home, in libraries, online, on the playground, and even at parties if one is lucky. But the right to education is understood as a right to schooling. Therefore, a right to free education requires using taxpayer money to ensure that 260+ million children in India can access quality schooling.

This promise is non-trivial because taxpayer money is a limited resource. Guaranteeing such rights needs to be balanced against the state’s other responsibilities, including its core functions such as maintaining law and order. Finite resources, low cost-effectiveness of government schools, poor learning outcomes, and weak incentives of actors in the system should push us to question the extent and nature of the government’s role in school education. Since private schools outperform those run by the government and remain parents’ preferred choice, it is worth considering how to make private education accessible to more students rather than relying solely on government provision.