Rights and Responsibilities

I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals and doctors’ offices lately, and one of the things that I’ve started to actually enjoy looking for is the requisite poster outlining the “Patient’s Rights and Responsibilities.”  They’re always worded a little bit differently, and different institutions emphasize different things, but they all basically come down to: “Here’s what you can expect from us, and here’s what we expect from you.”

As I’ve been immersing myself in the ongoing conversation about education reform (see my last post for more on that), I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric based on the universal right to education.  Everyone has a right, the basic argument declares, to be educated, so systems (whether governmental/public or corporate/charter) that support that right are good and systems that do not are bad.  In other words, every child can legitimately say, “I expect to be given the opportunity to obtain a formal, certified education,” and every parent can legitimately say, “I expect my child to be given the opportunity to obtain a formal, certified education.”  The source of the education reform debate is that this opportunity can be given in any number of wildly varied ways.

I’m starting to think that I disagree with the premise itself.  Perhaps this feeling of entitlement isn’t actually doing us any favors in our efforts to provide better education.  It seems like it would be much more profitable for us to replace the “education is my right” with “education is my responsibility“.

It should be noted immediately that this is not at all the same thing as saying “education is a privilege.”  Privileges are optional luxuries, and education is of much greater importance than mere privilege suggests.  Responsibility, on the other hand, assumes right–you can’t be responsible for something you don’t have a right to.  By shifting our foundational understanding of education from “my right” to “my responsibility,” we can shift our dialogue, our policies, and our pedagogy away from self-serving notions of entitlement to educational handouts and towards personal engagement.

In our current cultural and political climate, it seems unhelpful for students and parents to simply say to educators, administrators, and politicians, “You owe me an education, now hand it over!”  The response has been the evolution of an educational system that has no method for holding the learner (or the learner’s environment outside of the school, including parents) accountable for contributing to or working towards what they perceive as a gift to which they are entitled.  In this system, only the gift-givers can be to blame for any educational failings, and so teachers point fingers at administrators and administrators point fingers at politicians and politicians point fingers at teachers.

Let’s reframe the conversation, basing our system and its strategies on responsibility rather than right.  Students need to recognize their role in advancing their own education.  (That means that they need to be given a voice in their own education, by the way, and not just treated as repositories for standardized test answers, another unfortunate consequence of this gift-giving style of education.)  As almost everyone agrees, parents need to recognize their role in their children’s education and act in support of it.  Educators, administrators, and politicians need to recognize their roles in the educational system–but even more importantly (because most seem to be generally self-aware of their own duties), they need to be aware and supportive of each other’s role.

Education as a right has only created a something-for-nothing culture in which demands are made without any requirement of personal investment or accountability.  If we’re going to improve the quality of education in our country, then at every level of involvement we have to replace entitlement to education with engagement in it, beginning with our discourse.