PHOTO: Brazil: In December 2001, a girl, Elaine da Paixao Santos, stands in front of a wall on which she has drawn a heart and the inscription "I love you, mom" in Portuguese, on the grounds of the Mother City Foundation in La Paz, a poor neighbourhood in Salvador, capital of the eastern state of Bahia in Brazil. Elaine lives with her grandmother to avoid the fighting in her parents’ home. (UNICEF/HQ01-0442/Claudio Versiani)
The Right to be Different and Respect for Diversity in Education- Keynote speech by Katarina Tomasevski

In this speech Tomasevski discusses inequlity with education systems. She argues that although we all advocate education systems that are open to change and responsive to diversity, current education systems only reduce children to few denominators such as sex, age, disability, language, race, and religion. This is done for the purpose of statistical data to inform education laws and policies rather than for the situations encountered by children. As a consequence children continue to encounter inequality in school.