This book examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992.
Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends the book analyzes how the
Council of Europe and European Community's ideological goals were implemented for specific
national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s
then compares schooling for Italian Greek and Turkish labor migrants then circles back to
asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group the state entries involved tried
to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood an effort which became
particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993
children's access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of
cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities
children's access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity.
