WHEN SCHOOLS VIOLATE RIGHTS: A RIGHTS-BASED CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLING AND EDUCATIONAL GOVERNANCE

Abstract

Schools are widely regarded as institutions established to promote learning, safeguard children, and prepare young people for responsible citizenship. However, emerging scholarship suggests that educational institutions may also become environments in which learners' fundamental rights are compromised through governance failures, institutional practices, and organizational cultures. This position paper critically examines the conditions under which schools become sites of human rights violations and argues that such violations are often rooted in systemic deficiencies rather than isolated acts of individual misconduct. Drawing on rights-based education, educational governance, and critical educational theories, the paper synthesizes the perspectives of Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, Freire's critical pedagogy, Illich's critique of institutional schooling, Dewey's democratic education, Giroux's theory of transformative education, Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach, Sen's Capability Approach, and Tomasevski's Right-to-Education Framework. These perspectives are integrated with international human rights instruments, particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to develop a comprehensive analytical framework for examining learners' rights within formal schooling. Using Nigeria's public secondary school system as the principal contextual illustration, the paper argues that persistent challenges such as corporal punishment, psychological abuse, exclusion of student voice, discrimination, unsafe school environments, and inadequate compliance with educational laws represent governance failures with significant human rights implications. Building on existing scholarship, the paper proposes the Educational Rights Compliance Framework (ERCF) as an original conceptual model explaining how educational governance, legal compliance, institutional culture, and professional practice interact to influence the protection or violation of learners' rights. The framework positions educational law compliance not merely as an administrative obligation but as a governance mechanism through which schools fulfil their human rights responsibilities. The paper concludes that effective educational governance should be evaluated not only by academic performance and administrative efficiency but also by the extent to which schools respect, protect, and fulfil learners' rights to dignity, participation, equality, safety, and holistic development. It recommends a shift from compliance-driven administration toward rights-based educational governance that integrates legal accountability, democratic leadership, learner participation, and institutional safeguarding into everyday school practice. The paper contributes to educational management scholarship by providing a novel conceptual perspective that links educational law compliance with human rights protection and offers a foundation for future empirical investigations into rights-based school governance.