The right to education means that the state should make adequate provision to educate its citizens. Education sharpens the intellect, gives individuals the ability to work and trains them to the art of citizenship.
Citizenship has been defined “as the contribution of one’s learned judgment to the public good”.
Education is a prerequisite for liberating individual development and making the man fit for the tasks of citizenship. Laski says, “In the long run, power belongs to those who can formulate and grasp ideas.”
An uneducated individual can neither understand politics nor be vigilant about his or her interests and, therefore, his or her effective participation in state affairs is usually negligible.
Such a citizen must be the slave of others. He will not have the opportunity to rise to the fall size of his personality. “It will go through the life of a stunted being whose impulses have never been ordered by reason in the creative experience.”
It means the failure of democracy, because the people who are the ultimate masters will not be able to intelligently exercise their right to vote or perform their other civic duties satisfactorily. Thus, the democratic slogan is: “Educate the masters”. Apparently, the right to education is a civil right, but in reality it is a political right that protects it.
The right to education, however, does not mean the same intellectual training for all citizens. It only means providing that kind of education that should give all citizens an equal chance in this branch of knowledge for which they have an aptitude. Then there should be a mandatory minimum education level below which no one will fall, if it has to conform to the standard of a good citizen.
Every citizen should have at least as much education as possible to weigh, judge, choose and decide for himself. “We must make him feel that it is a world in which he can, by the use of his mind, shape both the outline and the substance”.