With birth come some basic freedoms and rights. Americans are brought up to believe that people deserve to be treated decently and that should lead us to allow everyone the freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Through our interpretive ways, some think the right to an equal education is also a right blessed upon birth. Thomas Jefferson just forgot “education” from his list that day.
Education, unlike the philosophical concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has a much more direct cost on a community. We should all be familiar with how the government handles this service industry buy subsidizing the bulk of the cost through indirect taxes. The education system was designed to be the pinnacle of Federalism, but has turned more and more to an example of fiscal nationalism since large amounts of funds flow from the federal level.
Since education exists as a service industry and not as a philosophical concept, I think it’s unreasonable and un-American to guarantee the right to equal education. After all, the only practical way to standardize education on a national level, to achieve equal education, would be the implementation of a nationalistic system of mandating local schools to follow lesson plans from the higher level. The budgets of states, counties, cities and school boards would need to follow certain fiscal guidelines to coordinate the equal spread of funds to schools when all the money from different government branches have finished distributing their taxes.
Federalism stands as one of the cornerstones of the American legal system. Our founding father James Madison would likely argue that the national government has no place deciding how education is ran. That power should be delegated to smaller regions. The logic suggests that people will be happier if they are in control of their own institutions instead of a national ruling. If California is dominant politically in a national education system, they could dictate education in the Carolinas. However, one of the reasons I live in the Carolinas is that I want to learn to be a Carolinian, not some Californian.
It’s unreasonable to expect all states and counties to invest the same amount of money into education. Coastal cities have different costs than cities in the Midwest. If we assumed two cities had the same tax revenue for a specified year, one might see an opportunity to invest in business infrastructure or a public hospital while another cities doesn’t and can divert all funds straight to the school system. Each city has a set of individual problems and costs, and a service industry like education must take a seat as a line item on government budgets.
My high school rests in the cornfields of O’Fallon, Illinois and we didn’t have the AP class system. Instead of studying for standardized tests, we studied subjects from the unique perspectives of our teachers. When I moved to our University and found all my friends from AP classes, they all had the same basic information in their heads. They had the same answers to the same problems from the same lesson plans. Problems in the real world don’t come in multiple choice though. Life comes at us in unique ways, and if we all learn differently and pool our knowledge, we can overcome a much larger array of obstacles than if we all know the same things.
I’m a Federalist, and I believe a right to an equal education stands against the very principles James Madison stood for when our country began. By creating a diverse learning environment and tearing apart standardization, we can create a collective of knowledge surpassing the potential of any AP scantron sheet. Let’s go to school to learn how to succeed in life, not on a test.
