The Right to Education

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds, among other rights, that everyone has a right to basic education. I find that most people agree with the concept of that as a universal right.

We understand that education has an instrumental value. More educated people tend to earn more, contribute more to their community, have healthier families, etc. Saying that there is a right to education however, says that whether education pays off or not, society has a moral obligation to educate people.

It seems to me that global society is seeing a divergence of command of knowledge, both among countries and within countries. The great universities, the great knowledge intensive companies, the most wired societies are farther than ever from the traditional institutions of Africa. I recall Nevin Scrimshaw who earned a PhD, MD, and MPH, and board certification in a couple of fields, who is the author of over 650 publications and an author or editor of more than 20 books. That is an amount of book learning that simply could not have been obtained long ago.

It seems to me at least possible that countries could advance more rapidly economically or socially by allocating educational resources so as to maximise social benefits, while denying some people basic education. A poor country might benefit more from more public health physicians and engineers, and might be tempted to spend less on educating mentally challenged kids or minorities in order to afford the training of the experts it needs. We in the United States might decide to drop subsidies for some vocational education and community college kids in order to get a few more MIT PhDs.

But if we define a right to basic education, and rights trump expediency, we can not morally accept such options.

That of course leaves open the question of how much education do people have a right to enjoy? In this country, we feel that free and compulsary education is appropriate for our citizens through at least high school, and qualifying students can go to community colleges and public universities. (Note that we put aptitude and accomplishment as qualifications to the right to highly subsidized education in public universities.)

However, we don't feel the responsibility to see that kids in poor countries have a comparable basic education, and indeed many Americans don't feel that kids of illegal immigrants living here have equal educational rights to the children of our citizens.

An alternative formulation is in terms of educational needs. Subsistence farmers, mothers, citizens -- all these roles would seem to have associated needs for knowledge, and while basic literacy and numeracy may be common across all these roles, some of the needs clearly differ from person to person.

Does a person have a right to the basic education to provide the knowledge that we say he/she needs?

It is easy to say people have a right to basic education, but it may be difficult to operationalize that right!