How does the “right to education” look then? I’d say quite differently, because we use educational history and brand to maintain the current power structure, and then we wail about how uneducated people have no opportunity.

Well, yeah, that’s because that’s precisely why the system was designed this way — to keep them out. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s not broken at all.

Maybe we should be honest about what we use “education” for before we see “access” as a panacea — because the current system, when we give the masses “access”, will simply find new ways to lock them out. It will make new distinctions.

It’s already happened in fact — the high school degree has been made worthless by universal college, so now students that once could get decent jobs out of high school have to put themselves in thousands of dollars of debt to get those exact same jobs.

That’s what we did the last time we fixed “access”. That’s the legacy of our great humanitarian push for universal college. We enriched bankers, impoverished students, and contributed further to the permanent adolescence of our nation by having students that would otherwise enter a world of work postpone it for 5 years.

Won’t get fooled again, hopefully?

Oh, and about the state: indeed, the whole notion of rights depends upon and reciprocally constructs the notion of a beneficent state. But we know that ain’t true, don’t we?

@Jon: This is an excellent point that beautifully frames the way in which the idea of rights becomes a product and power of the state. Which, by extension, they can grant and deny at will, and arbitrarily at that.

@Tony: Building on the above comment. Does the fact that the free and open education of the 70s and 80s (which afforded you real opportunities) has since been dismantled re-enforce some of the ideas of rights being always a condition of political, social and political struggle rather than an inherent human condition?

I think that my hyperbolic vision of street violence and mayhem reflects my own unease when working through these ideas, I am always out of my depth. But I find it both encouraging and exhilarating that a few folks care enough about these extremely important ideas to lay it all down in the comments. I’m extremely fired up! More than that, almost all the folks engaging in the discussion above are not even in the class -does my getting access to all these intelligent ideas mean I’m cheating?

@Mike; Glad to be at the top again. It only took a gut wrenching post and some critical theory to lure you back -you’re easier than me:) That said, I like the way you are pushing the differences between learning and knowledge above. You are helping me frame out my next post in this class, which in many ways will build on all the comments above, but in particular on the idea of learning not so much as a formal education but as a historical sense of struggle -to build in one of Jon’s points from above. Learning is that space that might focus a lens on various histories of struggle, and their relevance to the current, ongoing struggle for rights (as Tony’s above discussion of the uncertain status of a free & open education in eduction in Australia, as well as the ongoing struggle to maintain the the “right” to affordable healthcare).

Mystification? Hardly. Everything I say is grounded in a firm reality.

I am in Australia – btw your president is here in my city now – and we don’t have a bill of rights (though many are fighting for one – remember the pen is mightier than the sword.

Though regrettably no longer the case, for over 10 years in the 70s-80s we had a completely free and open education system. I was educated to a Masters degree under this system – without it I would never have gone to university. This radical reform was legislated by a reformist federal govt, and there was no fighting in the streets nor any overwrought intellectual debate.

That same reformist govt. gave us a free universal health system, again without incident, which survives to this day, despite attempts by conservative govts to undermine it. But people will be on the streets if they ever have the temerity to actually dismantle it.

Oh, and about the state: indeed, the whole notion of rights depends upon and reciprocally constructs the notion of a beneficent state. But we know that ain’t true, don’t we?

To put this another way: the phrase “fight for your rights” is strictly meaningless. You either have rights (the contractualist view) or you have to fight. And if you are fighting, you are fighting to construct rights, not because they are pre-ordained or self-evident.

So, in this case, nobody has a right to education. But they can benefit from a historic struggle for eduction, a struggle that is ongoing and is endlessly renewed.

But to frame such a struggle in terms of rights is in fact only a mystification.

And incidentally, in reference to Mike’s comment, the same goes for needs. Needs are not natural and pre-given: they are historically constructed. People’s needs today are different from what they were ten, fifty, a hundred years ago. And they are different in (say) the USA than they are in (say) Mexico or Japan or Rwanda. Needs, too, are the outcome of a process of struggle.

Any other version of the discourse of needs presupposes an unalterable nature. Just as the discourse of rights presupposes an inevitable state, which is likewise naturalized, eliminating history and politics.

My $.02.

It’s funny, because reading that question, I had the same reaction as you (or perhaps a little to the side): speaking from within an Enlightenment frame, within a history where education becomes a state concern, yes — this is a valid question.

But that assumes so much. To even say no to this I have to answer it from very narrow and circumscribed place — and that place is far more constrictive than any answer I could give.

But answering from that frame, that is, putting my tricorner hat on, the distinction we’d want to make is what you touch on: learning would be the proper natural “human right” since learning is the act, and can exist without the presence of the state.

Education is a product — and here it is Illich that is instructive: by confusing basic needs with the scientifically produced products and services which fill those needs we’ve done irreparable harm to our society and our humanity — hence when posed as a question about “education” as opposed to a question about “learning” you create almost instantly an acceptance of a role of government as that unassailable center — that is we rely on governments to supply our humanity, rather than protect it.

That’s a witches brew of 17th c. Enlightenment thought and a more modern strain.

Open and free education is a basic human right, and asserting that is neither violent or revolutionary in a free society.

So what if we were to do more than assert it in a free society? For example, let’s say we desire more than lip service and we demand it, fight for it, and/or die for it. Would that constitute “revolutionary”? For I am certain such an assertion put in action would quickly become violent.

In fact, it can be argued we everyone in the US has access to an open and free education, but I don’t think many would argue the equity of such access as consistent and adequate. Moreover, what if we were to extend this assertion to healthcare in the US? It think at that moment the barbarism of a system may become that much more readily apparent.

Freedom is embodied in the choices society allows us to make but also more importantly in a person’s CAPACITY for true choice. Open and free education is a basic human right, and asserting that is neither violent or revolutionary in a free society.

Jaded you are, D’Arcy. How can you start a revolution when you have no faith? One must believe in abstractions. And, in fact, this is the very genius of that notion of rights as self-evident truths. It allows an entire population to abstract the idea of freedom to something greater than their reality, something that exceeds any particular detail of their life yet can also be understod as some form of naturalized embodiment. Moreover, this abstraction is at the same time faced with its limitis when the definition of rights is not so much at stakeas the very question of what constitutes a human! Think about it, we have spent much of our time in these posts thinking about the questions of rights and what a basic or fundamental human right is or is not. When in 1776 (as well as the following (and preceding) 100 years!) the basic definition of human was still very much in violent contention. The danger is how we might scoff at such a gross distortion of humanity in retrospect, while at the same time repeat the same violent logic when we begin to imagine a mandated system of rights and education.

I actually have some serious concerns about parsing these issues along the lines of any any pragmatic solution. I think a pragmatic approach may have to suffice at times because we live in the world and must conform to it at times. (While a cynical perspective is not really an approach at all, just a form of capitulation -however astute.) A real shot at open education as a space to redefine the axis around which we think and learn means re-examining our relationship to nation states, one another, and ultimately the abstraction of power and its temporary embodiments in both ourselves as well as all the institutions and people around us. Education, in its purest form, is revolution! Open education is just a qualification of this fact so that we can live in the world.