ABSTRACT
Granted on all hands that education is desirable but supposing, further, that persons are entitled or have a right to it, what sort of a right is it? Is it a human right, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would have it, 1 or is it no more a human right than certain rights specified elsewhere in that same document, e.g., the right to periodic holidays with pay, 2 or the right to the protection of one's material interests resulting from one's scientific achievements, literary compositions, or artistic productions? 3 Surely the violation of these latter rights, important as it may be that persons have and enjoy them, is hardly that attack upon the status of the person with its actual or threatened destruction of his moral dignity, which traditionally has been taken as the distinctive hallmark of the violation of human or natural rights. Is, then, the right to an education on all fours with the special right to holidays with pay that workers here and now have by virtue of contractual agreements into which they or their representatives have entered, or by statutes or whatever devices it may be that such a right is secured—devices in the absence of which the claim that an employee in some factory ought to have a periodic vacation with pay, justifiable as it may be in terms of its contribution to his welfare, his increased productivity and the resulting increase in the firm's profits, could hardly include a right or an entitlement. Professor Olafson thinks that the right to education is, in this respect, different. He concedes that a consideration of public policy might well afford good reasons for providing the members of our society with the sorts of education that would enable them to contribute in various ways to the common good, but he contends that, quite apart from these reasons, there is another consideration that provides us with good warrant for making education available to them, namely, the fact that they are entitled to it. If he is correct the point he makes is of a degree of importance that is obscured by those who rest content with the declaration that a right is a good reason for getting or receiving that to which they have the right, as if nothing further needs to be said by way of elucidation.
