stimulant

I’m going to constrain the meanings of these words for this post. People bandy them about, but there are some essential differences that call for their distinction.

Opportunities are the chance to do something, the chance at something. Rights are guarantees that are (morally or ethically) inviolable. Privilege are opportunities accorded by virtue of your identity. Opportunities have nothing to do with power and everything to do with chance. Rights require power to enforce their guarantee, but they are guaranteed equally for everyone, so there is no disparity in power. Privileges are guaranteed precisely by the difference in the power held by the privileged (or their benefactors), and the unprivileged.¹

Obligations are external expectations that affect how bound to a course of action we feel. They are intrinsically normative (read: arbitrarily set by society). Responsibilities are obligations that accompany privileges or rights: they are the currency in which we pay for those guarantees. Frequently, we are not given a choice in assuming responsibilities. Duties are those things which our ethical or moral system suggest we do. The expectation of self-consistency then binds us to them.

Obligations, responsibilities, and duties tell us what we should and should not do. There is no guarantee intrinsic to any of them. If we want to behave consistently, if we want to try for Heaven, we can feel forced to do something. But those values are all external. That is, they require enforcement; they require power from somewhere else.

On the other hand, opportunities, rights, and privileges tell us what we can and can not² do. They require power to protect and guarantee, but not to provide. They extend the range of our free will, whereas obligations, responsibilities, and duties direct and constrain it.

Within this (admittedly narrow) framework, I would suggest that opportunities entail obligations, rights entail responsibilities, and privileges entail duties.

So, what does this have to do with education? These are all words that come around conversation about teachers and students and schools and parents. These are all words that are bandied about when people talk about education. And I’m frustrated by the ridiculous assumptions that get swept under the rug by our failure to distinguish between them.

“Education is a right,” some say. That may be, but that’s how we act. We act as though schooling were an obligation. Some say that education is an opportunity. While that’s certainly true in the vernacular use of the word, it’s not true here: education is not an option made available by chance. ³ Others say that education is a privilege. Does that mean that schooling is a duty? What are the duties of the educationally privileged?

At a talk by Noam Chomsky on the role of the universities in activism, he pointed that we (including him) were an exceptionally privileged group of people. And with that privilege, he said, came certain duties (namely, making the world better — or at least, not making it worse). In echoing the sentiment of noblesse oblige, Chomsky implied that our situation is one of privilege, distinct from the simple exercise of education. In part, it is exactly what and which schooling to which we have access that determines how privileged we are. The credential-laden culture of the industrial world guarantees that education cannot trump a lack of schooling; although, schooling can be enhanced by education. As such, I would not suggest that education is incapable of bestowing privilege. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what minimum level of schooling is necessary to provide for education’s pragmatic relevance. For instance, your undergraduate institution’s lackluster status can be counteracted and compensated for by a strong education: that is, by actually learning and doing something of substance. Despite this, a middle-school student educated to the level of a high-school student is still functionally stunted. They cannot partake of many of the advantages that a high-schooler enjoys, allegedly because of their education (e.g. easy college or job hunting). And while this continues to change, we are still at the point where a rush for credentials characterizes successful studenthood.

Peoople are generally comfortable couching education as an opportunity, right, or privilege, but not as an obligation, responsibility, or duty. But schooling is exactly the opposite, for most people! For most, school is something they are coerced to do. Keep in mind that this is separate from learning; while the option of homeschooling technically exists, for the overwhelming majority, it is a financial and logistical impossibility. If education is a right or a privilege or a responsibility, why is it so consistently and thoroughly forced upon us? Why are is there a police force — truant officers — to ensure our attendance? Why do we go out of our way to reinforce the power of college credentials, when this necessarily creates a class of have-nots? People have been convinced that a good education is an artificially scarce resource by being bullied into conflating learning with schooling, which is an arbitrarily scarce resource.

In the name of “providing” this opportunity/right/privilege to people, we even take from them other privileges, like the freedom of speech. The judicial standard for defining the constitutional rights of students was set in 1969 by the US Supreme Court Case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. As a result, we have the “Tinker test,” which tells us that:

free expression is guaranteed in the public schools where it (1) does not materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school, and (2) does not invade the rights of others.

Subsequent jurisprudence has not been kind to students. Even in 1969, Judge Abe Fortas commented that,

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Just to be clear, the US Supreme Court takes for granted that you must “shed [your] constitutional rights” at the schoolhouse gate. And this is to guarantee people the “right” to schooling — a right that is far more tenuously established than the right to free speech.

Not only are these assumptions about schooling and education implicit, but their consequences are never explicitly connected to these assumptions. Worse, the consequences (e.g. behavior problems in the classroom) are misinterpreted as causes of interference with people’s education as opposed to effects!

It’s essential to deconstruct this taxonomy of power in education to create not only the type of learning and creating environments we want, but the type of society we want. I don’t know if every activist feels this way, but to me, education seems like the prime mover in so many social ills.

And so I’m excited about fixing it. Start by speaking straightforwardly. Now, people use these words (i.e. opportunity, right, privilege; obligation, responsibility, duty) interchangeably. Try distinguishing between them when you talk and when you listen: I’ve been surprised by how radically different an impression of an argument can be had when you think carefully about which of these words people mean to use.

1. “Underprivileged” is such a shameful euphemism: it implies that everyone is entitled to same basic level of privilege. We conflate privilege and guarantee. [↩]
2. Note that I did not say “cannot!” This is essential. [↩]
3. Again, in the narrow framework I’ve constructed. I’m begging the question of whether the categories I’ve named guarantee collision-free categorization. That is, it is emphatically not clear at all that education or schooling (or anything else, for that matter) need fit well into this framework without requiring splitting or merging categories. [↩]