Is education a right or privilege? by Tien

Is education a right or privilege? by Tien - January 2021 Scholarship Essay

We are currently living in a fast-paced world which provides us a wide range of accesses, among those, education should be taken into account. Education is the most useful, important and basic industry in over the world, because it serves us good human resources, modern technologies and creative inventions in order to develop society more and better. The question is should we recognize education as a right or a privilege? In other words, whether education is our certain choice or base on our background?

What is education? Education is an industry which also is the fundamental field to maintain and develop other industries. Education also can be understood by the process of learning something new of human, for example teaching baby how to stand, teaching people how to drive, teaching people know how to do basic needs in their life,… and by those things we move forward to teach people advanced aspects such as math, moral, languages, knowledge about the world, name to a few. By that way, we can simply and clearly understand how educational industry operates in society. When talking about educational rights, every of us has equal chances of study, and has the right to choose which fields interested us. More specifically, nobody can force people to pursue their educational path, and they totally have right to fight for their certain choice of learning. Having said that, however, there are some reasons that make me think about educational privilege. Privilege can be specifically described as the background condition for obtaining the different level of knowledge between people who gets less and more accesses. To be clearer about this topic, let’s have a taste with my essay.

Actually, we probably stand for the idea that education is a right and we can choose whether to absorb or not. This is completely correct. The fact is that a lot of countries’ Governments encourage people to go to school regardless they are rich, poor or physical disabilities, all people have the same opportunity to approach education. Moreover, the Government takes a lot of effort on motivating children to have a passion in studying and maximize their benefits of gaining education. In order to grant an equal chance of studying, some Governments tend to lower tuition fees, grant student loans, scholarships,… for those who have less access than other candidates. For now, just imagine, if the law does not offer individuals the rights to broaden their educational level, there would be no equality for all and other human rights, because educational rights is literally the base of other human rights.

Besides that, however, every problem has its own two sides, education can explain by the word “privilege” as well. What I mean in the second paragraph “background conditions” is that although people have the same right for gaining pieces of knowledge, there still have unbalanced learning fields between people who get more and fewer accesses. People who are rich, not only pay for their major study field, but also have chances to enter more fields such as playing instruments, sports, or other majors if they want to. To someone who probably needs Government’s help on tuition fee and money to pay for daily life, how dare they spend more money on the other fields which are not related to their career purposes? In addition, not really all countries that can give students help on tuition fee, mostly poor countries can’t, because they don’t have enough ability for offering too much money on education aspect, and due to that reason, going to school sometimes very hard for poor children. That is the reason why a privilege usually uses for those who get fewer opportunities to approach education. As I said before, there is nothing right or wrong, it just depends on which situation we are standing for.

For the title: “Is education a right or privilege?” All I would say is it can be a right and it can be a privilege as well. It will be a right for all children, all people in over the world. It is true to say that education not only gives people a good job but also improves their own country’s industries. On the other hand, education will be considered a privilege for those who have limited opportunities to gain access and struggling of paying for their life as well.