Deconstructing Human Rights

I wasn’t going to post anything today, but I’m not very good at sitting on thoughts and keeping them to myself once they reach a certain bursting point.

This thought surpassed the critical burst threshold in about fourteen seconds.

The idea boils down to this question: Is education a fundamental human right? See also, its cousin from another industry whose economic model makes negative sense: Is healthcare a human right?

Spoiler alert on my answer: I don’t think that’s the right way to pose this question.

Some background. I was listening to an episode of Revisionist History about Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Their “Hope Forward” program has a progressive, benevolent aim: to remove the question of money from the minds of students with altruistic goals. To those committed to addressing hopeless situations in the world, Hope College wants to make it possible to get an education now free of financial obligations and to give back to their alma mater later.

My education at Moody Bible Institute followed a very similar model, and my job at Moody for about 10 years was to help fund that model, so I have a pretty solid understanding of how it works. A few decades and deconstructions later, I still love the idea. It’s pretty simple:

To address the most pressing problems in this world (problems typically faced and solved by people without a lot of money), it makes sense for people with money to fund the solutions. That doesn’t seem crazy to me.

Something I hear a lot is that all education should be free to its students, or at least up to a certain point. (Maybe surgeons and computer scientists and the like don’t need free post-doctorate education funding . . . or maybe they do, I don’t know.) To cut to the chase, the basic idea can be summarized in a single mantra:

Education is a human right.

I hear the same thing said about healthcare, that it’s a human right that should be denied to precisely zero people, but there’s something about these statements that bothers me. Do people deserve an education? Yes, I believe that. Do they deserve the best healthcare available? Does someone who is sick deserve treatment if effective treatment exists? Yes, I think that is the case. But I also think there’s something missing from this categorization.

Healthcare and education are dependent activities. What I mean is, these are things we depend on other people to administer to us throughout our lives. Healthcare is something provided to me by someone else, though it’s obviously very important that I care for my own health as well. Education is something I can do a little bit on my own, but I depend on teachers and administrators and eons of research and experimentation and innovation and expertise I could never access without the work of others.

Is something considered a right if I’m not born with it or if it isn’t manifest in my coming of age as an adult?

For the lack of time to research a canonical list of basic human rights, I’m going to pull the holy trinity of American unalienable rights from the DOI: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. As an individual, these seem to be innate qualities of humanity that no one need grant or give but rather tend to be taken away or infringed upon by the powers that be.

When a population observes that its rights are being compromised, those people collectively speak up on their own behalf and address by word or by force those responsible for taking away their rights. Is healthcare and education being taken away from anyone? I don’t think they’re being taken away so much as being withheld.

If I need someone to give me something or allow me access to something, it seems it’s either not a right or a different kind of right . . . a dependent right or a right endowed by someone other than my creator. Either way, I don’t think right is the right word or at least not the best way of looking at the situation.

Instead of viewing education or healthcare through the lens of the recipient of these provisions, it makes more sense to me to examine the perspective of the people capable of providing them.

Education is a responsibility. Healthcare is a responsibility. These aren’t commodities or services afforded only to those who can pay for them. Education is what a society gives to itself when it values both its individual members and its overall well-being and growth. Education is what the powerful give only to a select few when it values the preservation of the power structure at the expense of outsiders and the overall well-being of society. It’s the same with healthcare.

Anyone with power, anyone with wealth, anyone with a voice has a responsibility to educate and to care for those of us who need it. And we all need it.

To deprive someone of education is to define our particular sphere of humanity as exclusive. People who do this prefer to call it meritocracy—that is, there is something differentiating the people who deserve education from those who don’t, or there is something students have done to earn their status that outsiders have failed to do.

This mentality is betrayed quite blatantly and obviously by the tradition of legacy admissions to universities. We provide education to our kids. We recognize the responsibility to pass on an education to our own.

Our own. When we see someone who belongs to us (whatever that means, we all have a working definition of what that means to us) we know it’s our responsibility to care for them. It seems our personal definitions have narrowed in disappointing fashion. It’s becoming more popular (or more obvious) to define our own by race. Maybe more people define their own by creed, by political bent, or by some other vibe I’m failing to identify.

But if our concept of “we” has human beings sitting outside of the circle, we suck. Or, as John Donne put it:

The person is prison is a part of us. The hungry child is one of us. The young woman with a mind is ours to educate. We are sick. We are ignorant. We are waiting. We all have a responsibility to care for ourselves and to seek out education and to see ourselves as part of the continent of humanity.

To all of us who have, all of us who know, all of us who care, we owe it to all of us to keep learning, to keep teaching, to keep thriving, and to keep caring. It’s our responsibility, and it’s only right.