Education, is it a right or a priviledge?

Before any yelling starts....keep in mind...whichever way you stand on the issue...its just an opinion...not a fact.

Without a right to education, we have an ill-informed and permanent underclass.

particular level of understanding, skill, or knowledge. The obligation is to attend for a certain amount of time, the amount of time depending on the jurisdiction.

It's law somewhere.

IMHO.

Everyone has a right to a basic education and literacy. If they want it, it should be there's to have. After a certain point though it becomes a 'privilege'. If you don't want it, and dont' want to work for it, then you shouldn't get it. The question is where is that line. I'm thinking 16, but I'd go with 18 and end of high school.

Keep in mind though just because you have a right to something doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. You have a 'right' but each individual place that provides you an education does it as a 'privilege'.

What's the point of your question though?

...

What age/year/subject do you teach and what do you think? Right or privilege?

In practice, it seems to be a privilege.

"I'm thinking 16, but I'd go with 18 and end of high school."
My how "generous" of you! :sarcasm: And totally "bush-like!"

Unless you want a country full of dumb bunnies!

It should be a right way beyond 18? I can't even imagine that. A right?

I guess in a general sense of job retraining and adult education yes, but beyond that and a GED I don't see how for instance a College Degree is anyones 'right'.

What does 'right' or 'privilege' even mean in this instance?

Maybe 16 was harsh you're right, but what about people who don't really want to be there, and are just causing problems or dealing drugs and failing their classes? If we say they have a right to an education we can't keep them out of the classroom. So what happens? They get sent by districts to a 'special program' which trys to get them involved. So sure. They have a right.

At a certain point though, at 18 when you're an adult, that if you're not willing to act like one, I don't see how you have a 'right' to anything, particularly most education which is provided by independent non-governmental bodies at that point.

I don't want dumb bunnies, but I do think that at a certain point if you're not willing to do the work necessary to participate in a program, or behave in a non-criminal manner, that you shouldn't have it as a 'right'.

By the way I don't appreciate being compared to Bush. Not very nice of you.

emphasis added:


Nice inflection there that if you don't have a college degree, that you're probably behaving in a criminal manner. News I read everyday convinces me otherwise, in fact, I've often observed that honesty and a college education are inversely related to each other.

I said no such thing, nor do I believe that if you don't have a college degree that you're probably behaving in a criminal manner. In fact I think for many honest hardworking, and yes intelligent, people a college degree is unnecessary. One of the best computer programers I know, who I actually recruited into a company I worked for, was a 19 year old kid who never had the desire to go to college and just taught himself to program. He was far better after 1 year of his own personal education than another programer at the same company who was recruited out of MIT (and paid 20 grand more a year than the other guy) whom I had to hand hold for 6 months.

My 'inflection' there was just what it says. At a certain point you just don't have 'a right' to education. The statement you empahsized was there to say that a college or university, for instance, can choose to expell a student if they're participating in criminal behavior. If they're dealing drugs in the dorm, the school can kick them out. Another college shouldn't be forced to accept a student with a long and violent criminal record.

I wouldn't even change my quoted statement at all. I just think you're highly misreading it. I'm not saying that if you don't go to college you're dishonest. I'm saying that if you're dishonest you shouldn't necessarily be able to go to college. They are completely different statements.

:)

It's like education should be a right that everyone has, but that doesn't mean that the right can be abused. If you commit crimes or don't put any effort into your education, then you can lose the right to it. Which just makes sense, since it doesn't benefit society to pay for college education if people are going to blow it off and use it as a way to escape having to get a job.

through college. Good on them.

Redstone

up to some point.

It doesn't seem like a person should be able to spend 40 years taking up a seat in a university without any expectation of ever leaving. That would seem to be an abuse of the state.

So I would say a right, but with some end date to it. The end date would be wheer people would disagree. Some would say 6th grade and others would say age 65.

Even the old-school Robber Barons understood that.

Education for everyone. It's the cure for the Relapsing/Remitting Dark Ages. As far as I'm concerned, if we were an absolute dictatorship supporting an elite of schools and universities instead of military and prisons, it would be fine by me.

Don't get me wrong -- I strongly support the troops and the cops who risk their lives every day for crap pay and shabby treatment by the politicians who claim to be their best buds. No one is debased by doing our dirty work in good conscience (those who purposefully commit crimes and atrocities, on the other hand, can pay their own fare to Hell). But education isn't just a property tax pork barrel -- it's the only proven way to an utopian society.

We've got a pResident who is quoted as lacking respect for "the thinkers and the talkers and the planners". That ought to tell us something.

--p!

at least from 9 AM to 9 PM on Saturdays and Sundays?

Is the slogan "education for everyone" a euphemism for "credentialism ensures privileges for the elite"?

They ought to be the indoor social hubs of any community, not nightclubs, churches, and the area in front of the TV set. The library in my town, an affluent, Republican bailiwick, is only open 28 hours a week. That's abominable. As late as 1985, the library was open from 10-8 every day, except Thursday (10-10, for kids studying late for Friday tests) and Saturday (10-4). In the 1970s, it was even open on Sunday.

And I completely agree with the criticisms of credentialism. I've ranted about it many times. Until you posted, I think I was the only one on DU who ever even argued over it. Yet in spite of our "modern," corrupt, classist system of education, the very fact that we require our citizens to learn how to read -- and provide basic education for all children -- is a major improvement over the past.

One of the underlying problems we face in our semi-democracy is that Education has been turned entirely into a commodity, even free public education for kids being the target of wingnut politicizing about "confiscation through taxation". The "flow of information" is still mainly limited to socially connected in-groups, though the internet has opened things up quite a bit. Commodification and class-segregation of learning is a restriction of education, and it seriously threatens our entire world, not just American political culture.

Education can't just be a slogan, the way Laura Bush has used it. Public schools are fundamental necessities, but we need unrestricted, uncredentialed and un-credentialable learning of all kinds to become a common value. We pay the idea lip service, but unless we make life-long learning as desirable as personal savvy in entertainment or clothes is to our young people, we can kiss the idea of technological and cultural progress goodbye.

--p!

taxing/financing issues, etc.

"Education" is understood, I think, to mean "public education", not self-taught-from-library-books education.

My response in the Lounge has greater detail of my adumbration here.

The idea that education could be a privilege is something I find repugnant. That's like saying that health care is a privilege. Though I have heard people make both arguments...

I think education should be publicly funded even for college level, but there should be conditions. I don't think college should ever be compulsory (and I don't think there is any place where it is, anyway) and certain minimum performance levels should be in place. But I really do believe that society benefits when everyone who wants to be educated gets an opportunity to become educated.

that public education has been around since the beginning of the our Country. In the early industrial revolution Horace Mann convinced the powers that be that public education could be used as a training grounds for factory workers and public education become mandatory. This why your teenager goes to school early in the morning instead of their normal sleep cycle that keeps them up half the night and lets them sleep till noon. The destruction of public eduction has come about by the Republicans need for a cheap labor force that can compete with third world labor. Education is a right and is needed to keep a democracy running. We have a right to be educated to question our government on every turn. As to weather your schools need a football team or a band or a swimming pool becomes a whole other can of worms, but education is the basis of a good democracy.:patriot:

:)

With out an educated electorate, we can't make the right decisions at the voting booth. Good education and unbiased information are both necessary for a democracy to remain strong.

So I would have to call it an absolute right in a true democracy.

It is not a right, it is mandatory.

John Taylor Gatto

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."

http://www.rit.edu/~cma8660/mirror/www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Should a college education be a right? Maybe.

However, it's best to teach your kids that it's a privilege, just so they have the right attitude. :)

http://www.eparent.com/education/idea03_09.htm

"The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is commonly referred to as the civil rights act for children with disabilities because it guarantees the right to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment."

whether you think you have a right to be educated, or whether you think it is a priviledge to have an opportunity to be educated.

opinion
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&defl=en&q=define:opinion&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

Unless you're arguing that the disabled have a right to an education when the non-disabled do not.

Implicit in the IDEA law is the basic assumption that the disabled required an equal right to an education that the non-disabled already enjoyed.

whichever way you believe, it is still, just an opinion.
here's the new link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion

or a priviledge...its just an opinion...
its not a fact.

Laws don't confer rights? Is that what you're saying?

A law carries no weight beyond its reflection of a lawmakers opinion?

Since no one has a choice of whom they are born too, it would seem that society's obligation is to educate all the children as far as they are able to learn. So a lot of kids will probably not get Master's degrees and Phd.'s, but those whose minds are capable of this should not have roadblocks put up for them to achieve whatever levels they are capable of. Society gains from this.

You gain the right to an education by being born, and lose the privilege by failing academically.

The problem is not only that poor kids get no education but that rich kids get so many free passes.

Under our government, education is a social program. As far as I know, there is no constitutional guarantee to an education. I'm not saying that is right, but if I remember what I learned from going to school, ironically, is that it is not a right under the Constitution. This is why you will hear all the crazy right wingers call for the Dept. of Ed to be abolished.

It is certainly a necessity and anyone who would not support assuring an education for all Americans would be a complete idiot, but literally speaking on a national level it is a privilege. The responsibility of education usually falls under the State in most cases so I'm not sure how each state has the right to an education set up.

If anyone out there is more of a Constitutional scholar and I am wrong, please let me know. I'd actually like to be wrong.

there is no argument. Saying it is a privilege is tantamount to spitting upon others, their potential and the future itself. It is unfair, selfish, detrimental, cruel, unjustified and wrong (and then some) to say that education is not a right. That much is a fact.

Duty of communities to provide educational opportunities.

Duty of students to work at achieving.

Duty of parents to monitor, instill, and reinforce.

I hate the rights and privilege rhetoric because is smacks of everyone being educated if they want to be. Education is work -- an arduous responsibility.

I never would have thought that when I was in high school, hating it, but now I realize how important it is.

Does "it's just an opinion" mean to you that no real argument can be make either way?

I strongly believe that education should be right to anyone, American citizen or not. It is a universal value that all should have access to education. The alternative would create ill-educated subclasses which would cause more problems than trying to educate everyone. Here in the US we do a pretty good job with most inequities caused by poor funding models for schools and a lack of respect for the teaching profession especially from reichwingers and fundies.

Here are some interesting reads: UN declaration

Here is a good one. This is a SCOTUS decision on educating immigrants, undocumented included. I include this because the SCOTUS makes the statement here that denying an education to child, any child, would be much more detrimental than incurring the extra costs of educating undocumented children and I agree. The decision also states that education is right and that to deny a child that right, it would be a violation of the 14th Amendment. Plyler vs Doe

... (or of being anyone else whom we decide it's in our best interests to educate).

Education is also the OBLIGATION of the kids and the parents to do their best to succeed at.

So all three: right, privilege, obligation.

imo.

I know we live in a world where there is one standard, and one standard only, which is created because of the people who mold reality to maximize profit, but there can be other ways of learning outside of textbooks.

Should be available as though it is a right, but valued by those who receive it as a privilege.

You said, that ..."whichever way you stand on the issue...it's just an opinion...not a fact." I couldn't disagree with you more, and THAT'S a fact.

It's also a fact that this is the U.S. we live in, and not some thirld world country. It is also a fact that education is mandated by law, which means that it is a right, and not a priviledge.

What even makes you ask this question?

should have an education. I think it is a right. I think it is necessary to have and sustain a democracy.

it is a necessity.