A comment by Eagle Talon to a recent post http://emutalk.org/?p=373 raised an interesting question: is education a right?
Perusing the Bill of Rights doesn’t help me much, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendments.html, because any specific right being addressed is referred to as a constraint on the federal government’s power: “… the right of the people [...] shall not be infringed.” Looking over the implied rights (which is all of them) in the Bill of Rights, e.g., freedom of speech and exercise of religion, none of them explicitly requires an active effort on the part of any other group or individual: freedom of speech says nothing about about the requirement of anyone else to listen, the right to bear arms implies nothing about subsidizing weaponry.
So here’s my problem: saying someone has a right to an education is a positive statement, not a negative statement. The Bill of Rights (negative statements on individual and group rights) does not help me as an analogy to understanding a possible right to education. So, would (note the subjunctive) a right to an education imply a right to being taught: is there some constraint on the teachers in the teacher/student dynamic that is forced by a right to an education? Would a right to education imply that someone, group or individual, has to subsidize or pay for it? So far, the right to freely exercise a religion does not imply that the government (or anyone) is required to subsidize religions. What if no accredited medical school will accept an applicant who wants to learn medicine — is his right to education being violated? How does prerequisite enforcement play in to the right to be educated? What other right has constraints analogous to prerequisite enforcement?
Obviously, I have no political science background, but if we’re talking rights, then I as an intelligent citizen should understand the arguments for a newly explicated right. What do you think?
This is the sort of simple view but the way I have always thought about it is that K-12 is a ‘right’…in this country. It is subsidized (although not equally or fairly, IMO) and mandated (or at least it used to be…in the days of ‘truant officers’). Beyond the ‘public schools’, it is a privilege, an opportunity not to be wasted, something that the student can take full advantage of or fritter away (as so many of us do in our first few years of college).
These are major questions facing our society. My view is that over American history in the last 180 years, the “right to an education” has grown: first grammar school, then thru secondary school, and increasingly in the post-1965 period, higher education. And at each of these levels, what education meant has grown a lot and become more complex and inclusive, as well, so it’s not just growth in grade levels, but growth within grade levels, the “content” of education.
This expansion of the right to an education – meaning, a right to a publicly financed education of more and more complex content and for a longer portion of a citizen’s life – has coincided closely with the increasingly more complex technological infrastructure of the society. Hence, the expanded right to an education has been as much a “public” good as an individual good, as it has been in large part the basis of economic growth and relative social stability in the US. And this expansion of education has largely been very popular with the “average American”.
Another key way that the right to an education has been expanded is in the recognition, by the courts and education departments of the US and state govts., (if not the legislators who fund K-16 education) that students of various learning abilities, including people with all types of learning disabilities, have a right to an education that is appropriate to their needs and abilities. This kind of expansion has been since the early 1970s and is far from complete (and Michigan as a state this season seems to be retreating from it), but it is a significant part of the “right to an education” idea.
This idea of education as a right is more a goal today than it is an existing “right” at least on the college level. But rights are only won, not granted, and they are won thru social struggles. Black people before the Civil War had no “right” to their own freedom….they won that right by asserting it and fighting for it. Analogously, the right to education for all will exist only if it is demanded and fought for and won. If it is, I think our world will be richer for it, so I agree with Eagle Talon on this.
Another important part of Susan’s post on this is what she calls “prerequisite enforcement” and whether any comparable restriction exists on any other right in society. I think there is one, and it is one of the most powerful features of our society, one so pervasive we rarely see it as affecting our rights: And this is how wealth/income affect our “rights” in the market place. I have a right to buy a Rolls Royce…but only if I have the $. Otherwise, I have no right to a Rolls Royce. You have a right to buy a house in any neigbhorhood where there is a seller willing to sell to you…but only if you have the $. You can attend any private university that admits you, but only if you can pay the tuition or get someone else to pay it. Car deals, real estate firms, and Harvard can’t discriminate against you on grounds of race, religion, sex or national origin, but they do routinely discriminate based on wealth and income. Getting what you can “afford” — but nothing more — is the prerequisite enforcement of our capitalist economy, where our right to buy things is, according to surveys of the public, Americans’ most cherished right.
Perhaps the right to vote is also analogous, in that it is a right guaranteed to adult citizens; but to meet the prerequisite you have to register to vote and go vote on election day. But that, since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is a far more readily fulfilled prerequisite than the market place prereq that I mentioned above.
And just because I’d like to learn to be a great pianist or brain surgeon does not mean that in a society that accepted the idea of education as a right I could have unlimited access to lessons with great piano teachers or would have to be taken into a medical school: I’d have to show real talent at the piano or promise for medicine for access to those educations. After all, even with education as a right in the 19th century one room schoolhouse, only the kids who applied themselves to their Lessons got the benefits of the educaton. Some types of education are very expensive and complex to offer (piano, med school), and could not be provided willy nilly without promise of achievement. Education is about achievement of the individual student; a society that recognized the value of education as a right would not make us all equal in achievement, but it would let us all have greater opportunities to achieve thru the educational system.
As most American academics know, the US provides more access to higher education than most comparable societies do, but the US also is falling behind in the # of people who obtain higher education degrees, compared to other societies….So the right to an education thru college would be a smart social policy for the US, and it’d also be a winning issue for politicans. Of course, few college students vote, so…..
Sorry to go on so long, but I have on history professor’s hat and I can’t take it off just yet, so one more point, this on the Bill of Rights: Yes, Susan, the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the US constitution – are expressed as negative rights. But the 14th Amendment (1868) is what made those rights binding on the states as well as the federal government, and the 14th Is what makes the constitution really interesting, a real ally for the cause of human freedom: Because the 14th proclaims that all citizens have the right to due process of law and equal protection of the law, among other things.
This amendment is written in sweeping, universal terms (it also created birthright citizenship, which is still a radical idea for most of the world in 2007, 139 years after the 14th Amd. was ratified). It, if properly interpreted, IMHO, could provide a sound basis for education as a right, K-16, in American society. Equal protection of the law? For higher education in Michigan? Ha! Look at the sociioeconmic profiles of who attends EMU versus UoM, both schools created by state law, and what each school gets from the state, and the inequalities are striking…
I do not however expect the Bush Supreme Court to be so forward thinking as to recognize a constitutional right to a higher education of quality. ….This after all is the week in which that Gang of 5 that controls the Supremes basically undid the constitutional logic of the Brown decision of 1954, handing down decisions in the Louisville and Seattle school cases that will certainly speed the racial segregation of the public schools. That’s another topic, one much on my mind this week, and one closely related to the Right to An Education topic, but I am now taking off my history professor’s hat for the night. Thanks for the post Susan, and thanks to everyone for reading my overlong comment.
I’m not sure about the number of people obtaining higher education degrees in this country Mark, but I guess I would wonder about a source/cite on the claim that those numbers are decreasing in general and in relation to the rest of the world. I can’t find this book on my shelf right now, but I think Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary claims that at the turn of the 19th/20th century, the percentage of Americans who even attended a post-secondary school was in the single digits. I think that number now is about 60%, though the number who actually graduate with a degree is quite a bit less. How that compares to, say, Germany of France, I have no clue.
In any event, I’m not sure if education is a right or not. I do know though that the government in this country has been systematically trying to stop funding higher education for a number of years. All you really have to do to see this is look at the decreasing percentage of revenue a place like EMU receives from the state. I think this is the primary cause for rising tuition, and I think it is also rather regressive in that what the state of Michigan is essentially doing is passing on the cost of an education to those receiving it, and this is a population (particularly at schools like EMU) that can least afford it. So if education is a right, it’s being taken away.
Let’s also be careful about the term “right” here, too. I think that sometimes people think of education as being something that they are entitled to– thus the “hey, I’m paying the tuition here, I should be able to show up and do the assignment or not do the assignment or whatever I want.” That’s not the case, of course.
So I think the right we’re talking about here is more of an opportunity: that is, within certain constraints (e.g., the admission standards of a given institution and the ability of the student to pay tuition), Americans have a right to pursue a degree in higher education. That system actually works different in a lot of countries in that students are “tracked” early on and directed toward trade degree programs instead of universities, and, as I understand it, it’s not really easy to get out of that track.
But maybe someone who knows better can correct me on that.
And for all the fun that an education is, it’s kind of amazing to think that many would be doing better spending that same time getting paid for 8? years and learning to be a plumber. At least if you plan to work in Michigan, an education is becoming a penalty, personal satisfaction aside.
Countries like South Korea and Italy have seen great jumps in the last few decades in the # of people getting advanced education; the US has lagged, relatively speaking. In 1900, very few Americans even got high school diplomas, and the age of mass college education in the States is a post-1945 development. These numbers are from UN studies, reported every couple of years.
And i completely agree, Steve, that education as a right does not justify “hey, i paid tuitiion, i am entitled to credit…and an A!” kind of thinking. But access to education as a right — that is a social goal worth supporting.
I imagine that nearly all readers of this blog support increased public funding for higher education. It enriches the society.
I think that nearly 30 years ago, some people assumed that our present population would be much smarter.
http://tinyurl.com/acmoz