© RRK 1973
Long overdue is a system of financing education that is commensurate with the equalization clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and more importantly the implication in the Preamble in ''promot[ing] the general welfare and secur[ing] the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
What is not generally understood here is the given that every citizen understand and comply and that he partake in the grand promotion and security since the Constitution was designed by a free, democratized people. Thus, ingrained into the framework — not simply a treatise by the enlightenment of the aristocratic founders — is the essence of enlightenment for all and their posterity.
The trouble with existing and projected a posterior formulae is a nebula of state and local funding, block grants or targeted expenditure from the central government, along with laissez-faire vouchers, private sector grants for higher learning — not to mention clumsy compromising of “equalization” through sales tax riders, lotteries, per capita income indices — all of which are contingent upon the luck of the draw, economics, politics and demographics.
Education cannot be trifled with by the conditions of any given era. True, education would be in flux, but unlike amendments, it would be guided always by its unique mother principle. A national philosophical commitment is necessary to uncover the variables of costs and energies expended in the formation of a child of citizenship wherein he or she is to secure the ultimate aim of his or her “blessings.” Current formulae tend always to view education as a corporate expense account dictated by the economic index.
Something as politically and philosophically based as education should not be formulated in competitive juxtaposition with the economic realm. Since it appears that our institutions are secure in virtue of their uncanny deception of adapting to change, thus averting “revolutionary” upheaval — a dead myth, anyway, in a nation of apathy and ignorance — education as an institution is safely tucked away because ostensibly it plays a minor role in adapting to the caprice of the socio-economic index. One needs only to look as far as the negotiating table to sense the utter pathos of the likes of Shanker and the increasing virility of the invisible forces dictating terms and conditions to defend the dollar. After all, how necessary is universal education when a society can muddle through with a minimal supply of intelligentsia and tradesmen?
Many are of the belief that the naturally endowed learn in spite of the educational system, which to a degree is true, but does not logically follow that even they will find their full potential without a guiding hand, nor on a societal plane lead to a more perfect union. Few are gifted as such and require a sensitively structured learning process — all in a democratic society must be tempered in forging the values explicitly and implicitly expressed in the constitution. A gifted geophysicists still must appreciate the glory of rational participation in a democracy as well as in that of the stars; an ingenious automotive mechanic must — other than the workings of internal combustion — understand why it is essential that he vote.
As a rule, this springs from the formative years of learning across the disciplines in order to expand socio-political awareness predicated on the theme of democracy and its preservation. Had the Germans been so intellectually disciplined, Hitler would never have come into power. To a lesser degree, incompetence and insensitivity of politicians in this nation would never have materialized; for no one could argue logically that our Preamble is not continually resisted. Manifestly, education as an institution subjected to the interplay of the whole is not the same as education that is as at once the foundation and buttresses of the entire social structure. Here is the rub.
If education is but a function and product of the sum of the whole, then it follows that it is at the mercy of volatile excursions of society; as a matter of fact why have it at all? Why not simply let it be the privilege of the few as it was at the time of the Founding Fathers? Education philosophically, however, is not to be construed as such — it is not a part, not a mere consuetude blessed by the good graces of ad-hoc legislation — it is society’s essence.
The argument that our forefathers excluded education from the formation of rights is fallacious; it was the inalienable a priori proposition that formed those rights — “I think therefore I am free!” Every citizen is to be the sentinel of rights and responsibilities. It matters not that in the pragmatic realm the forefathers feared the unwashed or were motivated by crude economic gain, the logic of the Constitution still stands: the people shall establish justice in order to promote the general welfare and secure individual rights, which immediately raises the question “what is justice?” and therefore establishes education as an existential inquiry into justice and the living breathing constitution that is open to modifications toward a more perfect union.
This rules out governance as the exclusive privilege of the hierarchy, many of whom are appointed or elected out of ignorance by voters ill-informed because the nation has been derelict in opening and inspiring the collective mind of its people. A clear case in point is that the art of governance is as much lacking as the educational process; otherwise the issues of the day would have long ago been put to rest. There is an undeniable correlation between the quality of government and the access to quality education in behalf of the voter. Laws of society, then, are inherently bound to education and not the inverse.
Just laws exist in the pragmatic realms in virtue of education's input; it is illogical for the handmaiden to dictate to its mistress. Had the Founding Fathers not been privy to the great philosophic and educational values of England, the remarkable document would not have borne fruit. For the Constitution to be logically consistent as well as just, and thus adhere to its first principle of justice, education is rooted in an a priori imperative, and as an empirical institution of governance, whence all inquiry into justice springs. Notwithstanding its empirical faults, there is not a citizen who does not owe allegiance to this mother principle.
Interlaced with allegiance are educational costs which are precisely that: constitutional maintenance expenditures necessary for the survival of justice, of the individual, of all other institutions, and are not to be perceived as purchases of rights and privileges. What is needed are not formulae that reluctantly present to Paul what has been purloined from Peter, but a national consortium to determine what constitutes education institutionally in order to develop an awareness and consequent action of justice, general and individual welfare, regardless of cost, whether more or less.
Once this consortium on basic equalization and sophisticated enhancements takes hold, the distributive principle will logically be keyed to justice, and not to the balance of institutions. The distributive principle is based on the measurement of capital input necessary for the edification of the individual and general welfare in conjunction with the qualitative ambience of the school community. Despite the Herculean task, to arrive at the formation of justice in the child there must be indefatigable inquiry into innumerable areas and variables. In absence of an ideal community, a conflicting ambience is poor breakfast, absence of a room in which to do homework, inadequate transportation, overcrowding, unsafe neighborhoods, weak student-teacher ratio, paltry sum of educational years behind the parents, poorly trained teachers, administrators without vision and expertise, learning disabilities, the handicapped, boards that obsessively watchdog the bucks, schools in disrepair, ad infinitum.
The consortium would engage in problem-solving in such areas as head start, school construction, academic, citizenship, and vocational curricula, class-size variables, special education, professional qualifications, free or low cost teacher-training — all of which would be fully funded mandates. Partially and proportionately funded mandates that would be discussed would be such things as transportation, security guards and devices, degree of direct support for parochial schools that follow mandated curriculum, food subsistence, after school instruction and recreation, extra-curricular activities, community colleges and trade schools — needless to say, vouchers would not be discussed at all because irrelevant. States and their school communities would have discretionary control at their own cost in such things as athletics, enrichment classes, advanced placement, electives unique to their territory, field trips, and architectural luxuries, such as lush landscaping, planetariums, swimming pools and plush theatre-like auditoriums.
Regardless of the formula — keyed to existing indices now in effect — the distributive principle cleans the slate and inscribes uncompromising justice within the matrix of a superordinate ambience that has failed to reflect the imperative of enlightenment. The distributive principle’s a priori imperative of education’s core in behalf of the general welfare and equalization is based on knowledge and justice — indifferent to cost — and the smithy for the individual who ultimately reconstructs the general welfare and society itself for the better.
At the expense of education — thus the cost of a newer, just society — the current practice is a furnace of economic-determinism that tempers the perpetuation of capital’s investment in behalf of “practical” institutions. Yet there is an indefinable dichotomy in the learning process where cost to society ends and profit begins — the G.I. Bill is a case in point — particularly when one perceives the school, as the single largest employer in many districts across the continent , let alone the undeniable axiom that a just, enlightened society generates the general welfare exponentially.
For too long we have allowed education to be a sacrificial lamb left to the whims of districts and states. Not only is this unconstitutional, but undermines the great document’s foundation. It is a constitutional necessity for the government to guarantee quality education for all. There is no room here for state’s rights. In practice the right is no different from the right of Scarsdale to finance a superior education system to that of the South Bronx. Under the distributive principal individuated community pride would always retain the options to top educational quality nationwide, but must do so within its own tax structure. No offense to Mississippi or New Hampshire, but their education system will never equal that of New York’s, Wisconsin’s or Maryland’s without a national priority of overwhelming infusion of federal dollars for widespread enlightenment. Just as the federal government has the right to press the state militia into a national guard, constitutionally the federal government has an implicit obligation and without exception to insist on national standards to pave the way for the education of citizens to develop a sense of justice and to protect the national right of every child’s education.
Admittedly it was a huge blunder for the Founding Fathers not to spell out the duty that “We the people, to appreciate the nuances and challenges of democracy, be thoroughly educated;” nevertheless, the Constitution by virtue of its creation by magnificently educated men for the time, inspires national responsibility for universal education. That the responsibility fell haphazardly to the states was burlesque, tribal. A just system of financing education, then, once national aims are articulated, is universally operative and keyed to input designed to offset the conflict of an unjust environment that views education its stepchild, rather than its mother.
