Vincent J. Curtis
21 Mar 20
Out of sheer boredom, I read Latham Hunter’s entire column today in the Hannon Times, headlined “How about the pandemic of poor literacy?” She makes the moral allegations that people have a human right to literacy in particular, and a human right to an equal education in general. To the Ontario Human Rights Commission enquiry into how children with learning disabilities are either provided, or denied, an equal education, she would say emphatically no, children with learning disabilities are not provided with an equal education by the province of Ontario.
Hunter engages in the usual left-wing babble about human rights, which can be briefly summed up as whatever we think good it is a human right to have, and the government must provide it. This is how progressives disparage the genuine right to free speech into forcing a totally made up right to be called by whatever gender pronoun you happen to choose at that moment.
Literacy is not a human right; it is a human skill. When we say a person reads at a grade six level, a high school level, or a university level, we are grading them as to their level of skill, not to a degree of right. Primative cultures often had no written language, and so “literacy” in that language was impossible - and it is impossible to have a right to something that doesn’t exist. So, the idea of a universal human “right” to literacy falls to the ground.
Nevertheless, in modern Ontario, literacy in English or French is a good: good for the individual to possess the knowledge and skill necessary to be literate, and also good for society as a whole to have a large proportion of its membership to be literate. The job of teaching letters to the young in Ontario begins with the provincial government. To fulfill that responsibility the province has set up standards, programs, school boards, and the vast array of other things that deliver teaching in Ontario. But teaching is one thing, learning is another. Human beings are capable of learning without teaching, but they learn much quicker with teaching. An education is the result of a lifetime of learning. The province teaches in a more or less standard way the material that its youth needs to learn.
So far, it is the right to equal treatment under the law that ensures that a student in Ontario receives teaching approved by the province. It is up to the student in their learning to make best use of the teaching they receive, and, human beings being what they are, there is a wide range of learning outcomes. Hunter and the OHRC make the characteristic left-wing mistake of requiring equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. The right lies in equality of opportunity, while equality of outcome is impossible, and the costs of trying to achieve that aren’t worth it.
Ontario does recognize that there are students with disabilities, and strives with more or less success to accommodate this reality. To get there, we depart from human rights, which are universal, to the classification of human beings into groups, each group having its privileges. In Hunter’s case, there is the person with dyslexia or some such learning disability. Ontario has the financial power, and the education profession the sophistication, to deal separately with special cases, provided the type of problem has large enough numbers to warrant a special teaching approach. One can argue that it is good that Ontario do this, but it is not a human right that Ontario do this because human rights pertain to individuals, not to groups. If the provincial government threw up its hands and said it can no longer afford special programs, it might be a tragedy; it might be bad politically; but it would violate no one’s human rights because the human right is to equal treatment not to tailored special treatment. (Remember, special categorization is done by government, and what government giveth, the government can taketh away. Human rights are not granted by government, they are endowed by nature.)
A century ago, provincial education in Ontario stopped at grade ten. To go higher, one had to pay one’s own way; and that is still the case to get post-secondary education. Did it violate human rights that Ontario only paid for education to grade ten, (and there were no special programs then)? Of course not, because the right is to equal treatment, not to reach a certain outcome, an outcome which changed over time. Human rights are timeless things.
Progressives have always misunderstood the nature of human rights. Compelling speech in some to satisfy a psychological need in others is a violation of the right to free speech of those so compelled. Shutting down the speech of people you disagree profoundly with is not an act of free speech on your part – it is a violation of the right of free speech of the individual you don’t like, and of the right of their audience to hear what they have to say. Equality of outcome is not a human right, in part because the concept pertains to groups not to individuals, and human rights belong to the individual.
When dealing with special cases, progressives refuse to understand that human rights, being universal in nature, do not apply to special cases qua special case, and so cannot properly be invoked. But progressives do frequently and illicitly invoke human rights because of the rhetorical power of the call. We can now see that the OHRC enquiry is wrongheaded, and ought to be ended. For that matter, the OHRC has proven itself a greater threat to human rights than it is a protector, and so ought to be abolished.
As for Hunter’s argument, what she is complaining about boils down to having to spend her money to deal with her special case, and not the province spending its money to deal with it. An education is the product of teaching and learning, and the province is only responsible for the teaching part; the student, each with their individual strengths and weaknesses, is responsible for the learning part. An education is what the student makes of their learning opportunities.
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