Social cost of education

Gary works as an environmental consultant, and is fascinatingly equipped with a creeping cynicism toward the human ability to act collectively.  My attempts to explain why I agree with him - due in part to the individualistic cant of the American educational system - keep failing.  Then, today, Stanley Fish answers with an excellent post.  I leave you to agree or disagree with Dr. Fish's conception of academic freedom (an institutional, not a political right, also explicated in these two books).  My point, as I now understand it, concerns how the modern project of human rights unfortunately uncouples these rights from human responsibility.

A shift towards liberty requires a theory of freedom, or rather, a freedom from something.  Think of our Bill of Rights.  Many are negative freedoms, expressed limitations on governmental action.  Cast this way, liberty is a restraint upon governmental action, not enumerated rights.  By offering rights by way of restricting that which would constrain them, our Constitution does not sever a citizen's rights from her responsibilities.  Over time, groups and individuals made successful arguments for their rights, but the amendment process because exponentially more difficulty (as rightly it should; except in California, for some reason). Arguments of these kind are political, moral, cultural, the whole gamut of human interactions.  Into the public sphere, these rights could more easily be explicit, since arguing for something (voting rights; economic fairness; equal opportunity) is a lot more effective than arguing for government to enact a law that limits government (except in California, for some reason).

Human rights, on a global scale, funds this trend.  Rights are attached to groups or individuals who lack these in their home countries.  Again, the enumeration of each right makes clear what is lacking for their basic humanity, not what should be done to limit the government restricting these rights.  In fact, pitched as human as opposed to national, there does not exist a government whose actions must be limited.  Rather, the right is a thing itself, to pursued and grasped.

Education, by way a process of knowledge accumulation, skill competency and grade/level completion, follows a similar path of expressing what is learned individually.  Students gain for themselves some thing more than they had before.  While it is certainly possible to teach responsibility as a necessary part of what should be learned, that too would be arguing for responsibility as another thing accumulated.  Perhaps that might not matter in the end, as long as people act in a mindful way according to the demands of their rights within their responsibilities.  But learning each as distinction allows each to be chosen distinctly and exercised separately, not of a piece.

As long as education is structured as a positive gain ("what I learned today is ___"), can schooling serve as an engine for collective action?