ON A morning walk recently, a man passed me wearing a jacket
with the legend "Education is a right, not a privilege." I took him
to be expressing the widespread discontent of young adults
hereabouts, but, seen from another angle, he looked to be in his
40s. In effect, he embodied a long-standing debate in
California.
As recently as the 1960s, California had a superb
public-university system, which was practically free to state
residents. Now, fees make it prohibitively expensive for poorer
students. Community colleges, which were intended to help those who
could not gain entry to, or afford, the more prestigious campuses,
are now so overcrowded that students have trouble getting admitted
to the classes they need in order to complete their course of
studies.
Throughout the United States, higher education is increasingly a
privilege that is dependent on the ability to pay. Students whose
families cannot afford it have been told for the past couple of
decades to finance their education with borrowed money - a policy
that has now created heavy burdens for recent graduates, who are
entering the job market in a period of economic constraint and high
unemployment.
For this generation, the difference between "right" and
"privilege" is not theoretical, but existential. And it is
difficult not to think that, in this respect at least, the
California of 50 years ago was a better and saner place than it has
now become.
Still, I doubt that "right" versus "privilege" is the best way
of framing the issue. It defines the matter too exclusively in
individual terms. I happily subscribe to the idea of education as a
right. I am, after all, an academic, and the love of learning seems
to me a justification in itself. But I am not convinced that a
"right" to education really explains what once motivated California
voters to create a free university system.
The early institution of public (in British terms, "state")
schools in the US, and, eventually, public universities, rose from
a sense that there could be no democratic government without a
citizenry that was educated to read, think, and participate
intelligently in public debate. The public accepted the expense
because it saw it as necessary, not just for personal advancement,
but for the well-being of the community.
California has been well repaid for its past expenditure on
education. If it has become one of the world's fountainheads of
innovation, this is not just because of abundant resources, or a
mild climate. It is because of its universities. Its counterpart,
found at the other corner of the US, is the small but
university-rich state of Massachusetts.
If education must be either a right or a privilege, I prefer the
former. But I find it more compelling to think of it as the
community's investment in a more humane future - both for its own
good, and that of the world around it, from which, after all, it
cannot effectively separate itself.
The Revd Dr Bill Countryman is Professor Emeritus of New
Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley,
California.