Through a series of international conventions and declarations in the course of the twentieth century, a basic primary education – generally thought of as at least five to six years of traditional formal schooling – has come to be understood as one of the universal rights of the child, and thus as a basic human right. This movement started in a formal international sense in 1924, when the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Resolution of the Rights of the Child. After many years of interim efforts, interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, this resolution was followed, 65 years later, by the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989 by the United Nations General Assembly, and thereafter ratified by 192 nations. As UNICEF’s report on The State of the World’s Children (2006) notes: “As the most widely endorsed human rights treaty in history, the Convention ... lays out in specific terms the legal duties of governments to children. Children’s survival, development and protection are now no longer matters of charitable concern but of moral and legal obligation. Governments are held to account for their care of children by an international body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, to which they have agreed to report regularly” (UNICEF, 2006: 1). In both of these international agreements, basic (primary) education was noted as one of those fundamental human rights.