Joel Gardner

Who Cares About Education, Anyway?
We hear all the time that education is important. But who really cares about education? Why should we as a people be interested in it? Related to this question is perhaps the more important question, "who is responsible for education?"

To answer this question, we should first establish the properties of education in the context of human rights. A human right has been defined as "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law." The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

The idea of human rights descended from the philosophical idea of natural rights which are considered to exist even when trampled by governments or society; some recognize virtually no difference between the two and regard both as labels for the same thing, while others choose to keep the terms separate to eliminate association with some features traditionally associated with natural rights. Natural rights, in particular, are rights of the individual, and are considered beyond the authority of a future government or international body to dismiss. John Locke is perhaps the most prominent philosopher that developed this theory.

Categorically, education falls under what some call welfare rights (also known as economic rights) that require it being provided by someone, e.g., paid holidays, and protections against severe poverty and starvation.

A few groups, conceptually divide rights into negative and positive rights. By this distinction, "negative" human rights, which follow mainly from the Anglo-American legal tradition of natural rights, are rights that a government and/or private entities may never take action to remove. For example, right to life and security of person; freedom from slavery; equality before the law and due process under the rule of law; freedom of movement; freedoms of speech, religion, assembly; the right to bear arms. These have been codified in documents including the Scottish Claim of Right, the English Bill of Rights the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United States Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment.

This distinction holds that "Positive" human rights mainly follow from the Rousseauian Continental European legal tradition and denote human rights and entitlements that the state is obliged to protect and provide. Examples of such rights include: the rights to education, to health care, to a livelihood. Such 'positive rights' have been codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 22-28) and in many 20th-century constitutions

With education established as a human right, the question must then be asked, whose is responsible to ensure that learning takes place? Responsibility has been defined as the state of being responsible, accountable, or answerable. It is duty, obligation or liability for which someone is responsible or accountable. But who is responsible? Is the learner responsible for his own learning, or is it someone else? If it is someone else, who is it? Parents, community, teachers, government? 

The United States Declaration of Independence alludes to individual responsibility in fulfilling our human rights. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The declaration of independence certainly alludes to the need for the individual to proactively pursue his or her purposes, and the obtaining of an education certainly requires the responsible pursuit of the individual. We can certainly thereby indicate the individual as having some responsibility for education. 

However, this certainly does not excuse parents, educators, communities and governments from the responsibility to create opportunities for learning to take place. Schools, information, time, etc should be provided to enable students to learn.

A foundation of learning is access to information. It is in this realm that st Open educational resources (OER) can increase the capacity for an individuals learning. OER's are an Internet empowered worldwide community effort to create an education commons.

The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

- Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals. - Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities. - Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

Upon gaining access, a student must have the capacity to focus his or her attention on what is most important. The ability to focus attention is the ability to select information that isimportant. The human mind is bombarded with millions of stimuli and it must have a way of deciding which of this information to process. Attention is sometimes seen as a spotlight, meaning one can only shine the light on a particular set of information. 

By giving people access to OER's, we give students access to information that might not have been available previously. But this does not necessarily help the individual learn. He or she must still take personal responsibility to learn. The old axiom "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" applies to education. We can give individuals all over the world access to knowledge, but they may never realize how empowering that information might be.