Why Affirmative Action is not the Answer, Why Universal Free Education is

[Christopher Hill]

Although the belief is that Affirmative Action will help those who are disadvantaged it in general helps those of minority backgrounds regardless of economic situation, while this is fine and dandy, we constantly hear of people talking about what they can do to get "affirmative action perks", often from people who really don't need them at all, we can definitely see a problem with a scenario when a poor young man who has worked hard all his life is turned down from school because he is not a person of minority descent, while at the same time a rich person of practically any descent (It is foolish to believe all rich people are white) can get his kid through school merely due to a perceived disadvantage that he has because of his "race",since it really is obvious that the child of a rich oil baron from Kabul or the Ambassador from Hong Kong is less able to get in to a school than a poor person who just happens to be white isn't it? It is obvious that there must be another solution, and this solution is of course to offer free and quality education at all levels for the entire life time of an individual, to allow a person to enroll in any of these programs regardless of any perceived factors which are so important to people in this bourgeois society, such as "Race", "Religion" and "Social Status", and to use these systems to make the world a better place for all. I believe that the educational system also needs a complete reform to cause Colleges and Universities to accept everyone and to shift the focus from profit to education, as we know the only true definition of Socialism is the abolition of exploitation of man by man, and what is more exploitative than forcing children to go to school to learn stereotyped information, at threat of putting their parents in prison, while in fact hardly teaching them a thing at all, except perhaps how to be a good servant to the ruling class?


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[JJM 777]

Is is true that people need to study many things unrelated to a specific job, in order to qualify to that job in the current system.

The obligatory math of many higher studies serves as an IQ test to filter smarter persons to the profession.

In some cases, such as medical doctor studies, it is good to filter the IQ of students in some way, to ensure that we get lucidly thinking and acting persons to professions where people's lives are at the mercy of any smallest mistake possibly made by the professionals.

[Joshua Purcell]

I agree with your argument, but with the same reasoning I see that affirmative action does not go far enough to solve the problem. Regardless of the motivations, intelligence, capabilities, ideals, religious beliefs, etc. behind the actions of the various social groups that make up our society, we have a major imbalance in how the benefits of our society are made available to and taken away from individuals and groups. There has been an imbalance for quite some time, and current affirmative action legislation doesn't go far enough in addressing these issues, but it is a step in the right direction. If we could have universal free education for all that would be better approach, but I see a problem at least at the beginning of this that is currently a focus of affirmative action and not so much for universal education: segregation. Affirmative action attempts to ensure that all schools have similar subsets of our society by having plans around busing students from certain neighborhoods to another. Without this type of system, we could feed into a class system by allowing segregation to happen by those classes.

I have this analogy that many people may not be familiar with, but I'll give it anyway. In the open source software movement (which I am very interested in) we have two very popular licenses... Apache and GPL (and I'll simplify the descriptions of these licenses somewhat):

The Apache license gives almost complete freedom to the end-user... you can take the open-source code, modify it, add to it, package it up in a binary blob and then turn around and sell that as a new product. The end products of open source code under Apache can either be open-source or closed-source, and they can either be used to benefit society as a whole or just the individual who benefited from the code by expanding on it. Corporations like this open source license because it means they can take from the community without any strings attached that say you must also give back.

The GPL is different. It says that GPL code is always open to everyone... anyone can download it, use it, modify and extend it, whatever. The catch is that you must be willing to contribute your modifications back to everyone; you must give back to that which you benefited from to begin with. I am a supporter of the GPL license. The Linux operating system and many other applications fall into this category. Any application I develop myself would be a GPL application if that were an available option given the circumstance. I use Linux exclusively on any system I have that level of control over, and that's been the case for a while now.

The analogy between the two scenarios is that universal education is to affirmative action what apache is to the GPL. Free means different things for different people... there can be varying levels of freedom that don't relate to the cost of the education.