Human Rights Declaration: care and schooling

Article twenty-five closes with care for mothers and children, and Article twenty-six opens the right to education. The declaration was drafted in English and French, and both texts count as originals. Numbered clauses appear as a digit, a full stop and a space, a pattern worth drilling on its own. Eleanor Roosevelt hoped the document would become an international Magna Carta for all people.

Where this text comes fromThe two articles joined here make one of the strongest claims in the whole document, and it is easy to read past. Article twenty-six does not say education should be available. It says elementary education shall be compulsory, which places a duty on states rather than offering a choice to parents, and in 1948 that was a long way ahead of what most of the states voting for it actually provided. The fragment starts mid-article and ends mid-article, so you get the join rather than either whole.

What you might not noticeArticle twenty-five protects all children whether born in or out of wedlock, wording chosen in 1948 to close a gap that most national laws of the time left wide open. Source

What it trainsSeven sentences in 477 characters, averaging under eleven words, with only three commas in the whole passage. That combination is unusual: the text is chopped into short declarative units and almost nothing separates clauses inside them, so the rhythm is stop, start, stop rather than a flow. Three digits appear, fewer than in the other declaration passages here. Not one of the seven capital letters falls inside a sentence. The word to watch is professional, twelve letters, arriving in the education clause where the sentences are longest.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource