Obama’s Sec. of Education Says Taxpayer Funded Pre-School is a Civil Right

-By Warner Todd Huston

Obama’s Secretary of Education, Chicago operative Arne Duncan, is hoping to make taxpayer funded, universal pre-school a “civil right.”

During comments made in Los Angeles at the LA Universal Preschool forum on Oct. 21, Chicago hack Arne Duncan said that universal pre-school was a “social movement” that was “just like” the civil rights movement.

“At the end of the day for me this is really a social movement,” Duncan said of taxpayer-funded pre-school.

“If you look at social movements, we all celebrate what happened in the 1960’s. The civil rights movement was extraordinarily powerful, life transforming, earth shattering. But the question I have is, why didn’t the civil rights movement happen in the 50’s or the 40’s or 30’s or 20’s?” he said.

“If you look at the movement now around gay marriage and marriage equality and gay rights that California is absolutely helping to lead. That’s fantastic it’s happening now, but why didn’t that happen two or three or four or five decades ago?”

Duncan went on to claim that “universal access” to “high quality early learning” is “coming” and is “the right thing to do.”

Of course, no level of schooling can be ever called a “right.” A right can only be something that you have that no one else is obligated to give to you. Freedom is a right because no one has to do anything to allow you to enjoy that right. But if schooling were a right, then a teacher would have no right to refuse to teach anyone and would, therefore, be a slave to anyone who insists that they be allowed the “right” of education.

It’s just like healthcare cannot be a right, nor housing, nor a job, all because you can’t enjoy these things as “rights” without requiring others to take actions to makes sure you can get them.

You can’t force someone else to do something make sure you get a “right” and have it be a legitimate right. Rights exist independent of any one else’s actions.

Anyway, the whole idea that education is a “right” is idiotic and dilutes the status of real rights.

But this is exactly the way communists and socialists like Obama and Duncan win. They pick feels good things that uneducated people hear and think, “gosh, that sounds good” but don’t understand at all how bad it really is.

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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.

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