reagan-was-a-horrible-president:
“Education isn’t a right. Medical care is not a right.”
No comment.
Ron Paul is an asshole. This needs to be repeated early & often, until enough people hear/read/see/know the truth. Ron Paul is an asshole. Ron Paul is an asshole.
I will say this again…they don’t want thinkers. They want graduates.
Okay, I’m going to bite. Education isn’t a right and neither is medical care, at least not in a constitutional sense. And not even in the sense that these rights that should be added to the Constitution either.
The US Federal Government is not (and should not be) constitutional bound to provide anyone and everyone education or healthcare; however, to the extent it provides anyone, within a certain category (e.g. income brackets, children, elderly, etc.) those services it becomes bound by the Constitution and civil rights laws not to discriminate on certain grounds (race or ethnicity, gender, handicap, etc.). My kids don’t have a right to Christmas presents, but if I give one gifts and not the other I’d be in the running for being a bad parent.
Another reason these are not rights is because they are not basic in the way that other rights already codified in the Constitution are, and as such they require a lot of resources to guarantee at the federal or state level, even. And to a certain extent, and this is the libertarian stance, it tramples other rights ((e.g. right to property) to guarantee a right to education or healthcare for everyone.
Now in my opinion, to say that education or healthcare isn’t a right, is not to say that these are public goods that the government should not provide for. These are public goods that should be provided for, but only to the extent that we can afford to provide that public good and also to the extent that these public goods can be provided in equitable manner.
I do think it’s possible to provide a significant social safety net including basic healthcare equitably and affordably by the public, but education is a whole other bag. Governmental monopoly-run education is discriminatory by default, by design. Its design philosophy is industrial and not human. So yeah jamescrow is right, “They don’t want thinkers. They want graduates.” But even more-so they want willing workers and mollified consumers1; and they may not be who you think they are 2.
[“The Meaning of a Liberal Education”, Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association (9 January 1909). ]
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[“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” ↩
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[I don’t think they are a group of people, but what we see as flaws of the educational system are features resulting from the original design intent. I believe education advocates are well-meaning, but I don’t think you can administrate in a top-down manner what each individual needs to become a critical thinking, productive citizen.] ↩
