Making Education Accessible for All (3)

At precisely nine o’clock, a convoy of polished black cars glides into a freshly painted schoolyard, escorted by flashing lights and earnest applause. A banner announces a historic commitment to educational equality, while cameras angle carefully away from the cracked walls behind the stage. A senior official delivers a speech about opportunity, innovation, and the bright future of the nation’s children, pausing for effect as aides distribute branded notebooks to a small group of hand-picked pupils. Outside the gate, parents wait in the heat, wondering whether this ceremony will shorten their children’s daily walk to school, replace missing teachers, or repair the leaking roof in Classroom Three.

Later that afternoon, the banners come down, the cars depart, and the photographers move on to their next assignment. The pupils return to desks shared by three, internet connections that work only on good days, and textbooks older than the slogans printed on them. The press release will speak of progress, partnerships, and transformational leadership, yet budgets remain unchanged, teacher shortages persist, and infrastructure continues to decay. In this quiet aftermath, the true lesson becomes clear: in some places, education reform is treated less as a public responsibility and more as a performance of concern, carefully choreographed for visibility rather than accountability.

On a humid Monday morning, far from ministerial podiums and curated headlines, Aisha waits by the roadside with her schoolbag resting against her knees, watching buses pass that never stop for her village. Her classroom is not far on a map, yet it takes nearly two hours on foot to reach it, crossing uneven paths and a narrow river that floods whenever it rains. By the time she arrives, lessons have already begun, and she slips quietly into an overcrowded room where forty pupils share torn textbooks and a single teacher. Meanwhile, in the capital city only a few miles away, children her age log into digital classrooms from air-conditioned homes, supported by private tutors and fast internet connections.

Both Aisha and those city children are officially enrolled in the same national education system, yet their daily realities could not be more different. This disparity is not an accident of geography, nor a failure of individual effort; it is the outcome of political choices about whose schools receive funding, whose communities attract investment, and whose children are treated as priorities. The contrast between ceremonial promises and lived experience exposes education as a site of power, where inequality is managed through rhetoric while advantage is quietly reproduced through policy. In this light, access to education is revealed not merely as a technical issue, but as a question of justice, accountability, and the kind of society that is being actively constructed.

Seen in this light, education becomes a quiet lament wrapped in official optimism, a tender ledger of promises announced beneath banners and postponed in classrooms. And perhaps, if the Garuda itself could witness these divided mornings, it would bow its radiant head and linger over the shield carved with rice and cotton, feeling those emblems of sustenance and dignity grow faint beneath layers of ceremony. For what is rice, when small stomachs still echo in silent rooms, and what is cotton, when warmth and worth are distributed by access codes and air-conditioned addresses?

Yet even then, there would remain a fragile hope, carried not by speeches but by children who keep walking, by teachers who keep arriving, and by parents who keep believing despite the arithmetic of disappointment. In that gentle persistence lies a quiet resistance to neglect. Still, the irony would not be lost on the great bird: that while concern is performed in carefully framed photographs, futures are negotiated in overcrowded classrooms, and while declarations soar from polished podiums, it is bare feet that measure the true distance to opportunity.

In that softened hour, its vast wings might tremble between grief and faith, knowing that flags do not mend roofs, slogans do not fill libraries, and ceremonies do not shorten long roads — yet also knowing that every child who opens a book despite all this carries within them the possibility of a kinder reckoning.

It is fundamentally true that when we speak about education and access to it, we are also speaking about equality and social justice, because education is one of the primary ways in which societies distribute opportunity, dignity, and life chances.

The Handbook of Social Justice in Education, edited by William Ayers, Therese M. Quinn, and David Stovall and published by Routledge in 2009, is a substantial and wide-ranging scholarly work that examines the theoretical foundations, historical developments, and practical implications of social justice in educational settings. Rather than focusing on a single narrow topic, it brings together contributions from many experts to survey and critically analyse how issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, language, disability, youth experience, and globalisation intersect with educational structures and practices, showing how inequities are produced and how they might be challenged through schooling, teacher education, and pedagogical change.

The editors and contributors situate the idea of social justice in education within a broad historical and ideological frame that recognises schooling as deeply intertwined with larger struggles for equity and democratic participation. They draw attention to the ways in which educational thought and practice have been shaped by social movements and intellectual traditions that challenge exclusion and oppression, rather than treating equality as a neutral or merely administrative goal. This includes attention to historical forces such as democratic and progressive movements in education that sought to expand access and challenge hierarchies, and critical intellectual currents—drawing on theories of power, inequality, and emancipation—that frame schooling as a site where social hierarchies have been both reproduced and contested. Within the handbook’s first section on historical and theoretical perspectives, contributors trace how educators and theorists have understood concepts like public good, community, and equality over time, reflecting on how ideas about justice have been informed by struggles over race, class, gender and other forms of social difference in and beyond the classroom. 

At an ideological level, the book engages with critical perspectives that reject simplistic or technocratic views of education, instead urging readers to consider how educational systems reflect and are implicated in broader social relations of power. By embedding discussions of social justice in historical movements and critical theory, the Handbook encourages a view of education that is attentive to both the historical roots of inequality and the possibilities for transformative practice through education as a means of addressing entrenched social injustices.

In full terms, access to education is never merely about the presence of schools or curricula, but about whether every person has a fair and meaningful chance to learn, develop, and participate fully in social life. When access is uneven, education ceases to function as a pathway to opportunity and instead becomes a mechanism through which existing advantages are reproduced. Those who are already privileged tend to receive better resources, stronger support, and wider networks, while those who are marginalised encounter barriers that limit their potential long before individual effort can make a difference.

For this reason, education is inseparable from social justice. It reflects how a society values different groups, whose voices are prioritised, and whose futures are considered worth investing in. Questions about school funding, teacher distribution, language policy, disability inclusion, and digital access are all, at their core, questions about fairness and collective responsibility. They reveal whether public systems are designed to serve everyone or primarily to benefit those who already hold social and economic power.

To frame education in terms of equality and social justice is to recognise that learning opportunities are shaped by broader structural conditions, including poverty, housing, healthcare, and political representation. From this perspective, improving educational access is not simply a technical reform, but a moral and political commitment to creating a more equitable society, where success is not predetermined by birthplace, income, or social status.

Diane Reay’s Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (Policy Press, 2017) is a sociological examination of the British education system that interrogates the widely held assumption that schools operate as neutral engines of opportunity and social mobility. In this book, Reay argues that education in England does not compensate for broader social inequalities but instead reproduces and deepens class divisions by educating children from different social backgrounds in fundamentally different ways.

Reay, who herself grew up in a working-class family before becoming a Cambridge academic, draws extensively on over 500 interviews with working-class pupils, young people and their families to illustrate how social class remains a defining factor in the experiences and outcomes of education. These personal and empirical accounts reveal that working-class children are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, are frequently placed in lower ability groups within classrooms, and face systemic barriers that hinder their aspirations and achievements.

While education is often promoted politically as a pathway to social mobility, Reay challenges this notion as a misleading and inadequate solution. She contends that focusing on individual success stories obscures the structural conditions that limit the majority of working-class students and may implicitly suggest that failure results from personal deficiency rather than inequality. 

Reay also situates the contemporary educational landscape in a historical context, showing how class-based segregation and differential valuing of social groups have persisted since the establishment of state education in the 19th century. Her critique extends to recent policy developments such as the expansion of academies and free schools, which she argues have often exacerbated inequalities rather than alleviating them.

Miseducation goes beyond diagnosis to question why a system that claims to promote fairness instead entrenches privilege, and it calls for rethinking educational practices and policies so that all children, regardless of class background, can have equitable opportunities to realise their potential. 

When we discuss access to education in a country, the starting point must be rights. We begin by recognising that education is a fundamental right of every citizen, not merely a public service or an economic commodity. From there, the next step is to ask, with honesty and care, who is being left behind.

To look at who is being left behind in discussions of access to education means moving beyond national averages and headline statistics, and instead examining how educational opportunities are distributed across different social groups, regions, and life circumstances. It requires attention to children in remote or rural areas, students from low-income families, learners with disabilities, linguistic minorities, migrants, and those affected by conflict or instability, whose experiences are often hidden beneath claims of overall progress.

In full terms, this perspective asks not merely whether schools exist, but whether they are genuinely accessible, adequately resourced, culturally inclusive, and safe for everyone. It involves questioning who faces longer journeys to school, who studies in overcrowded classrooms, who lacks trained teachers or digital access, and who must balance learning with work or caregiving responsibilities. In doing so, it exposes how structural inequalities shape educational outcomes long before individual effort comes into play.

Ultimately, to identify who is left behind is to recognise that unequal access to education is rarely accidental. It is produced by policy choices, funding priorities, historical marginalisation, and social hierarchies that systematically advantage some while disadvantaging others. Seen this way, the issue is not simply about improving overall enrolment or test scores, but about confronting injustice directly and ensuring that the most marginalised are placed at the centre of educational reform rather than at its edges.

There are clear ways to identify why such exclusion occurs, but they require a willingness to look beneath surface indicators and confront the deeper structures that shape educational access. The process begins with disaggregating data by income, gender, disability, geography, and ethnicity, so that patterns of disadvantage become visible rather than hidden within national averages. When enrolment, completion rates, learning outcomes, and school resources are examined across these dimensions, it becomes possible to trace where inequalities emerge and how they persist over time.

At the same time, quantitative evidence must be complemented by qualitative insight. Listening to students, families, teachers, and local communities reveals barriers that statistics alone cannot capture, such as discrimination, language exclusion, unsafe school environments, hidden costs of schooling, or cultural expectations that limit participation. These lived experiences help explain not only who is left behind, but also how everyday realities interact with policy decisions.

Crucially, identifying the causes also demands scrutiny of governance and political choices. It involves analysing how budgets are allocated, which regions receive investment, how teacher deployment is managed, and whose voices are represented in policy-making. Historical legacies of inequality, including colonial structures, urban–rural divides, and entrenched class hierarchies, must also be taken seriously, as they continue to shape present outcomes.

Understanding why exclusion happens requires seeing education not as an isolated sector, but as part of a wider social system. Poverty, healthcare, housing, labour markets, and migration policies all intersect with schooling in powerful ways. From this perspective, educational disadvantage appears not as an individual failure, but as the predictable result of structural conditions that can only be addressed through coordinated, justice-oriented reform.

[Part 4]
[Part 2]

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Making Education Accessible for All (2)

In an interview, a politician proudly declared:

“Jokowi is Pentium 1, and Gibran has been upgraded to Pentium 3!”

The younger staff, born after 2000, exchanged puzzled looks. One whispered:

“He calls it an upgrade, but it’s more like a nostalgic downgrade. Our political elite are stuck in the dial-up age, while society is already talking about cloud and AI. Pentium 3? That’s from the cybercafé era. People now use Core i9, some even talk about AI chips.”

The politician smiled, convinced he had delivered a clever metaphor. Meanwhile, the public laughed—not out of admiration, but because it revealed a truth: our political elite are still stuck in the age of dial-up modems, while society has already moved on to cloud computing.

“No wonder Gibran’s interviews are always sluggish and buffering—turns out he’s only been upgraded to a Pentium III. Who on earth would vote for that?”

Another friend chimed in:

“Of course it can be done—by rigging it through the electoral commission!”

The satire lies in the mismatch—what was meant as a compliment (“upgrade”) actually exposes how outdated the metaphor is, turning political rhetoric into comedy gold.

The politician’s remark about Gibran being a “Pentium 3” was indeed genuine and quickly went viral, as it was seen as irrelevant and rather amusing. The politician intended to highlight Gibran as part of a new, more advanced generation, yet the analogy he chose instead revealed a disconnect with technological reality and prompted the public to laugh at him. The Pentium 3 was a processor released in 1999–2000, so describing it as an “upgrade” sounds decidedly outdated to today’s digital generation. Many people judged the analogy as evidence of the political elite’s limited grasp of modern technological developments. Social media was flooded with comments, turning the statement into a running joke, with some even calling it a political communication blunder. This episode opened the door to criticism of the quality of political communication among the elite, while also showing how the public is becoming increasingly critical of the symbols politicians employ.

From a philosophical perspective, education is fundamentally concerned with the formation of the human person. It is not merely the transmission of information, but a lifelong process through which individuals learn to think, to question, to discern meaning, and to cultivate wisdom. Classical philosophy understands education as the development of reason and character, while modern traditions emphasise personal autonomy, critical consciousness, and the capacity to participate thoughtfully in the world. In this sense, education is about becoming fully human: learning how to live well, relate ethically to others, and understand one’s place within a broader moral and intellectual landscape.

Ideologically, education reflects the values a society chooses to promote and preserve. Every education system carries assumptions about what counts as knowledge, whose voices matter, and what kinds of citizens are desirable. Whether consciously or not, schooling transmits ideas about authority, success, equality, and identity. Education can function as a tool for liberation, encouraging independent thought and social responsibility, or it can operate as a mechanism of conformity, reproducing dominant beliefs and existing power structures. Thus, education is never neutral; it always embodies a particular vision of society and the individual’s role within it.

Politically, education represents both a responsibility and a strategy of the state. Governments use education to foster civic participation, national cohesion, and social stability, while citizens rely on education to gain the knowledge and skills required to engage meaningfully in public life. Political commitment is revealed through funding priorities, access policies, and curriculum design. At its best, education strengthens democracy by nurturing informed, critical, and engaged citizens. At its worst, it becomes an instrument of control, shaping compliant subjects rather than empowered participants.

Economically, education is closely tied to productivity, mobility, and development. It equips individuals with skills for employment and innovation, while providing societies with human capital necessary for growth. Yet reducing education to economic utility alone risks hollowing out its deeper purpose. Although education can open pathways out of poverty and contribute to national prosperity, an exclusively market-driven view transforms learners into labour units and schools into credential factories. A more balanced understanding recognises economic value while insisting that education also serves human dignity and social wellbeing.

Socially, education functions as both a bridge and a barrier. It has the potential to reduce inequality by expanding opportunity, but it can also reproduce social hierarchies when access and quality are uneven. Schools are spaces where identities are shaped, relationships are formed, and social norms are learned. Through education, individuals acquire not only academic knowledge but also social awareness, empathy, and a sense of belonging. The extent to which education promotes inclusion or reinforces exclusion reveals much about a society’s commitment to justice.

Culturally, education is the means by which collective memory, language, traditions, and values are transmitted across generations. It connects the past with the present while preparing for the future. Education preserves cultural heritage, yet it also enables cultural renewal by encouraging creativity and reinterpretation. In plural societies, education plays a crucial role in fostering mutual understanding and respect, helping diverse communities coexist while maintaining their distinct identities.

Taken together, these perspectives show that education is far more than schooling or certification. It is a moral endeavour, a political choice, an economic investment, a social practice, and a cultural inheritance. Ultimately, education expresses what a society believes about human worth, shared responsibility, and the kind of future it hopes to build.

According to the perspective advanced in Human Rights and Equality in Education: Comparative Perspectives on the Right to Education for Minorities and Disadvantaged Groups, human rights and education are not merely related in a technical or policy sense, but are fundamentally intertwined at the level of human dignity, social justice, and democratic participation. The book presents education as both an expression of human rights and a primary means through which human rights are realised in everyday life. In this view, education is itself a legally protected right, while at the same time functioning as an enabling right that allows individuals to understand, claim, and exercise their other rights.

The framework developed in the book emphasises that without equitable access to meaningful education, many other human rights remain abstract or unattainable, particularly for minorities and disadvantaged groups. Education provides people with the knowledge, critical awareness, and social capacities necessary to participate in civic life, resist discrimination, and challenge unjust power structures. As such, denying or limiting access to quality education effectively undermines the broader human rights architecture, because it restricts individuals’ ability to act as informed and empowered citizens.

The book also stresses that human rights principles impose concrete obligations on states in the educational sphere. Governments are not simply expected to offer schooling in a minimal sense; they are required to ensure that education is available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable for all learners. This includes addressing systemic inequalities rooted in poverty, ethnicity, language, disability, gender, or migration status, and actively transforming institutions that reproduce exclusion. From this standpoint, educational injustice is understood as a form of human rights violation rather than as an unfortunate side effect of social difference.

Furthermore, the comparative perspective illustrates that when education is treated primarily as a market commodity or administrative service, its human rights function is weakened. Such approaches tend to privilege those with economic and social capital, while marginalised communities are left with fewer opportunities and diminished life chances. By contrast, a human rights-based approach insists that education must be organised around equality, participation, and accountability, ensuring that public systems serve the common good rather than entrenched privilege.

The book argues that education and human rights are mutually reinforcing. Human rights give education its ethical and legal foundation, while education sustains human rights by cultivating critical thinking, mutual respect, and democratic responsibility. In this reciprocal relationship, education becomes both a site of rights protection and a powerful vehicle for social transformation, shaping societies that are more inclusive, just, and respectful of human dignity.

The editors of Human Rights and Equality in Education: Comparative Perspectives on the Right to Education for Minorities and Disadvantaged Groups seek to convey a central message that education must be understood and governed as a matter of human rights and social justice, rather than merely as a technical policy domain or an economic investment. Through bringing together comparative studies from different national and social contexts, they aim to demonstrate that educational inequality is not accidental or inevitable, but is shaped by political choices, legal frameworks, and institutional practices that either reinforce or challenge existing power relations.

At the heart of the book is the editors’ insistence that minorities and disadvantaged groups should be recognised as rights-holders, not as passive beneficiaries of welfare or special programmes. They wish to show that the right to education carries concrete obligations for states, requiring proactive measures to dismantle structural barriers, address discrimination, and ensure that educational systems are genuinely inclusive in both access and quality. By foregrounding lived experiences alongside legal and policy analysis, the editors emphasise that equality in education cannot be reduced to formal access alone, but must involve substantive outcomes, cultural recognition, and meaningful participation.

The editors also seek to challenge the growing tendency to frame education primarily in market terms, where efficiency, competition, and employability dominate public discourse. They argue instead for a rights-based approach that places human dignity, democratic citizenship, and social cohesion at the centre of educational policy. In doing so, they highlight how commodification risks deepening social divisions, while a human rights framework offers a more ethical and sustainable foundation for educational reform.

Ultimately, the editors intend the book to serve both as a critical diagnosis of global patterns of educational exclusion and as a normative call to action. They invite policymakers, educators, researchers, and citizens to rethink education as a collective responsibility and a cornerstone of democratic life, urging societies to measure their progress not by economic performance alone, but by how well they protect the rights and life chances of their most vulnerable members.

In The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for Democratic Schooling, Sonya Douglass, Janelle T. Scott and Gary L. Anderson (2019, Routledge) offer a sustained and critical interrogation of the way educational policy both reflects and reproduces broader patterns of social and economic inequality, while also pointing towards more democratic alternatives. Rather than treating education policy as a neutral, technocratic field of rational problem-solving, the authors consistently foreground the political nature of policy itself, showing how dominant reforms in the United States have been shaped by ideologies of neoliberalism, marketisation, and managerialism that privilege choice, competition and accountability metrics over equity and collective well-being. From this perspective, policies such as high-stakes testing, school choice mechanisms and the expansion of charter networks are not merely administrative instruments but political projects that redistribute resources and opportunities in ways that entrench racial, class and spatial inequities, often at the expense of the communities most dependent on robust public schooling.

The authors analyse how structural barriers emerge not just from the content of specific policies but from the political choices that underpin them. They deploy critical policy analysis to reveal how ostensibly neutral policy processes often advantage well-resourced actors — including corporate reformers, philanthropic organisations and policy elites — while marginalising the voices of teachers, students, parents and local communities whose lived experiences should be central to decisions about schooling. This framing situates educational leaders as political actors whose professional identities and practices are shaped by power dynamics that extend far beyond school walls. By tracing interactions among federal and state governments, district leadership and non-state actors, the book demonstrates that structural barriers to equity are embedded in policymaking processes that limit democratic participation and prioritise efficiency and competition over justice and inclusion.

Despite this critique, Douglass, Scott and Anderson do not resign themselves to pessimism; rather, they insist that educational policy can be reclaimed as a site of democratic struggle. They argue for a reconceptualisation of leadership and policy work that centres social justice, culturally relevant advocacy and community engagement. In their account, democratic schooling entails practices that place the public back into public education — for example, by promoting participatory governance structures, by recognising and valuing the cultural wealth of marginalised communities, and by fostering collective agency among students, families and educators. This involves redefining leadership as a moral and political endeavour that challenges existing power hierarchies and works towards redistributive equity rather than managerial compliance.

In practice, the authors suggest that promoting democratic schooling requires cultivating relationships across the traditionally distant spheres of policy research, practitioner experience and community advocacy, so that policy decisions are informed by a richer tapestry of voices and perspectives. They encourage educational leaders to embrace critical reflection on their own positionality within political structures, to build alliances with broader social movements for justice, and to co-create policies that better reflect democratic ideals. By weaving together theory, policy critique and examples of transformative practice, the book not only diagnoses how educational policy interacts with inequality but also charts possibilities for advancing equity and democratic schooling in ways that are responsive to both structural constraints and the agency of those working within schools and communities.

The central message of Douglass, Scott and Anderson in this book is that education policy is never merely technical or administrative, but is always a deeply political endeavour that actively shapes whose lives are valued, whose voices are heard, and whose futures are made possible. They argue that contemporary reforms, especially those driven by market logics and managerial accountability, have normalised inequality by presenting it as an unfortunate side effect rather than as the predictable outcome of deliberate political choices. At the same time, they insist that this condition is neither inevitable nor irreversible, because policy can also be a vehicle for democratic renewal when it is reclaimed by educators, communities and students themselves.

In essence, the authors are calling for a shift from seeing schools as sites of compliance and competition towards understanding them as civic spaces where democracy is practised, not merely taught. They urge educational leaders to recognise themselves as political actors with moral responsibilities, and to move beyond technocratic problem-solving towards forms of leadership rooted in social justice, collective agency and community partnership. Their message is that equity cannot be achieved through narrow performance metrics or top-down reforms, but requires participatory policymaking, respect for the cultural knowledge of marginalised communities, and sustained challenges to the power structures that reproduce disadvantage.

The book conveys a cautiously hopeful argument: while educational policy has been a powerful instrument of inequality, it also holds genuine potential for transformation. By embracing critical reflection, building alliances across research, practice and activism, and centring democratic values in everyday decision-making, the authors believe that schooling can once again become a public good oriented towards dignity, inclusion and shared flourishing, rather than a marketplace that sorts winners from losers.

Seen through the lens of this book, the central conclusion about access to education is that access is never simply a matter of school availability or expanded choice, but fundamentally a question of who genuinely benefits from policy and who is systematically excluded by it. Douglass, Scott and Anderson help us to understand that educational access is shaped by political decisions and power structures: when policy is driven by market logics, competition and narrow forms of accountability, what appears to be wider access on the surface often conceals deeper inequalities, because those who are already advantaged possess far greater social, economic and informational capital to navigate and exploit such systems.

From this perspective, access to education cannot be understood as an individual responsibility, as though success merely depends on personal effort. Instead, the authors demonstrate that barriers to access are structural in nature, embedded in funding arrangements, school choice mechanisms, assessment regimes and policymaking processes that prioritise elite voices over grassroots communities. As a result, students from low-income backgrounds, minoritised groups and marginalised regions encounter multiple layers of disadvantage that are largely invisible to those who benefit most from existing arrangements, even though all are formally described as having “equal access”.

At the same time, the book argues that equitable access can only be realised when education is reclaimed as a public good and a democratic space, rather than treated as a commodity. This means that expanding access cannot be achieved merely by increasing institutional provision or consumer choice, but must involve participatory policymaking, recognition of local cultural knowledge, and educational leadership that consciously confronts inequality. In this framework, genuine access entails ensuring that all students are not only able to enter schools, but also receive learning experiences that are dignified, relevant and empowering.

Ultimately, the authors conclude that access to education is the outcome of democratic struggle rather than the automatic result of technocratic reform. They invite readers to recognise that advancing access is inseparable from advancing social justice, requiring the dismantling of structures that reproduce inequality, the amplification of community voices in decision-making, and the reorientation of policy towards collective well-being. Only through such an approach, they suggest, can access move beyond formal inclusion towards meaningful and substantive equity.

[Part 3]
[Part 1]

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