I dig those little buttons you see sometimes. The ones CFS hands out saying, “Education is a Right!” What I don’t get, though, is why anyone thinks that kind of a slogan actually means anything with respect to education funding.
You’ve probably been in this discussion once or twice in your life. Chatting about tuition, or funding, or whatever, and someone takes the position that there should be no fees/greater funding/etc. You debate the merits of the point for a while and then that person – often with a tone of smug moral superiority – lays down the trump card: Education is a RIGHT! And then dares you contradict him/her. After all, you’d have to be some sort of monster to constrain a right, wouldn’t you?
Of course, this is horsepucky. Education is not the only economic and social right which has been enumerated by international convention; how would those other “rights” look if we presumed that: if “X is a right” then “X must be provided free of charge”?
1) Housing. Shelter is of course a right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 27, for you treaty nerds). Now maybe I’m not paying close enough attention, but I don’t see anyone arguing that housing should be provided free of charge by the state just because it’s in the UDHR. It’s been done of course – many communist countries went down this route – but one of the results is that housing providers tend to want to make provision more uniform. And of low quality.
2) Food. Even North Korea doesn’t make food free. Subsidized, yes; free, no. That’s because even the most hardline communists recognize that different people have different tastes, and have the right to use the fruits of their labours to construct their own consumption baskets.
3) Health. Most countries buy some of their health-care collectively though some sort of insurance function, which makes it free in the sense that the zero-tuition crowd would like education to be. But not even Canada pays for all its health care this way – between eyes, teeth, drugs, elder care, and sports medicine, private expenditures still make up 30% of all health care dollars in Canada. The difference of course is that this is insurance – protection against random catastrophic loss. Education doesn’t work in quite the same way. One rarely hears of young people being randomly and catastrophically educated.
In short, the “rights” argument is the start of a conversation, rather than the end of it. In no other social and economic fields does the fact that something is a “right” make it automatically free to all. Rather, it means that it needs to be available to all, and selectively subsidized where necessary. In other words, the status quo.
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Alex,
You are absolutely right: “education is not the only economic and social right which has been enumerated by international convention”. Your argument, however, is built off of both a faulty premise and a superficial reading of the conventions wherein the rights you mention are enumerated.
First, the premise. Your primary argument seems to be that, because some economic and social rights are not available free of charge in practice, these rights or similar need not be available free of charge in general. Perhaps there are particular governments that have attempted or failed to make, for example, housing or food free, and below I’ll treat those rights in detail, but that doesn’t imply that they could not be free in the future.
But before even arguing for free housing or food (or healthcare or education) based on enumerated rights, we should look at how those rights are actually enumerated in the international conventions you mention.
Housing, food, and healthcare are all discussed in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here it is:
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Very well. The right to a ‘standard of living’ is rather difficult to define, but the qualification of it needing to be ‘adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family’ at least puts a bound on how far one can fall without support from the state. Fortunately, many of those services are available in Canada, and are even capable of being improved; but an ‘adequate standard of living’ is absolutely distinct from ‘free housing, food, and healthcare for all’.
In contrast, Article 26 on education states the following:
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Here, there is a clear statement of the requirement of at least some education to be free. Now, I am inclined to extend the principles that necessitate free elementary education to higher education, to wit, the opportunity to learn for self-development and future prosperity; to me, higher education continues to fulfil the criteria set out in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child that an education “promote [the child] general culture and enable [them], on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop [their] abilities, [their] individual judgement, and [their] sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.”
Now, I’ll accept that not everyone agrees with me. But even if they don’t, we still have the unequivocal statement that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”. I think it’s pretty clear that ‘merit’ doesn’t imply ‘financial ability’. So, we’re left to consider what “equally accessible to all” might mean. Based on the initial statement that “education shall be free”, I’m inclined to treat higher education in the same way. Of course, you can also devise a system composed of targeted financial assistance and general tuition fees, but here the guarantee of equal accessibility diminishes, as the basis for targeted assistance often relies on assumptions of family and financial circumstances. There is also the obstacle of not knowing what assistance will be given or how to apply for it. I’ve personally experienced both of these phenomena. So, while it’s possible to imagine such a system without friction, that alone does not make it preferable to a fairly straightforward system of free upfront education.
And when we say ‘free’, we’re also being a little misleading – our social services, at least in Canada, are paid through a system of progressive taxation. Making the system more progressive and eliminating tuition fees is not only possible, it is also more equitable, as Hugh Mackenzie has recently demonstrated (http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/learning-and-earning).
Of course, I’d be interested to hear your response. But I hope that I’ve at least shown that ‘Education is a Right’ can reasonably entail higher education that is cost free up-front. ‘Free’ is just less of a mouthful.
Thanks for reading, Nick. And thanks for the thoughtful response.
I don’t think Hugh Mackenzie has proven anything of the sort. He’s just re-defined the word “progressive” to mean something absolutely ridiculous. (see here: https://higheredstrategy.com/a-dreadful-argument-about-tuition-fees/)
The parallel I’m making between articles 25 and 26 is that these are things to which “everyone has a right”. But they are also things which carry price tags – price tags which most people can handle on their own. We don;t need to make food or housing free to guarantee these rights, because it;s self-evident that most people achieve this on their own. The state only steps into these markets to guarantee these rights when individuals can’t do it on their own. Hence, EI, social assistance, subsidized housing, etc all exist to secure these rights for all, but we don’t give them to everybody because we don’t need to.
Tuition fees plus student aid are exact analogies of this. We ask people to pay for higher education because it is non-compulsory and because there is a private benefit associated with it. Many people can pay for this on their own (just like most people can pay rent or a mortgage on their own). For those who can’t there is student assistance (just as there is social assistance, subsidized public housing, etc.) We subsidize selectively because many people need no assistance at all.
The heart of your argument, I think, is this statement: ” Of course, you can also devise a system composed of targeted financial assistance and general tuition fees, but here the guarantee of equal accessibility diminishes, as the basis for targeted assistance often relies on assumptions of family and financial circumstances.”
But this is just wrong. Progressive taxation relies on assumptions about financial circumstances, too, and I don;t see anyone complaining about that. The guarantee of equal access does NOT diminish at all with need-assessed student aid. Just look at the evidence from around the world – countries without tuition are no more equitable in terms of the social backgrounds of their student populations than countries which have fees + aid combination. What does diminish in these systems is the need to give significant amounts of public money to upper-income families who very clearly are quite comfortable paying fees on their own.
I have no problem with the notion that tuition should be free for lower-income students. I think generous subsidies are necessary in those cases – as they are in the case of food, health and shelter. Where you and I appear to differ is that you seem to think that students from upper-income families need that subsidy as well. And I just don’t buy that. There are far more valuable ways to spend scarce public money than to pay upper-income families to do what they were going to do anyway. We don’t subsidize their food or rent – why should we subsidize their tuition beyond what we already do?