>I simply disagree with this. It is not a right that everyone have a free education anymore than it is a right that everyone have a free pair of underwear, but people get confused because one seems noble and the other silly. Why do they use the word "free" here when obviously it isn't?
Does your link explain how education is a human right or free? It might be a good investment, but that hardly makes it free.
When anything that requires significant effort (skills, capital, services, etc) is pronounced as a right to be given to all, that right, by definition, necessitates payment or enslavement of others to be fulfilled.
Please stop mincing words; you know as well as I do what the phrase "free and compulsory education" refers to. Yes, it's tax-funded. No, taxes do not constitute enslavement. (And before you mention that you said "payment or enslavement of others", let's both agree to admit that you included the word "enslavement" solely for dramatic effect.)
I'm not going to play the "human rights" game, because you have no rights [1]. I'm going to say that providing education to everyone has been proven time and again to be good for society [2]. The attitude of "oh well it's not a right" is perhaps the greatest piece of sophistry I've been subjected to in some time, in that the definition of a "right" is entirely subjective and consequently useless. It is a right as much as the freedom of speech, in that it's provision helps to provide a basic framework that is necessary for a free society. An uneducated populace cannot perform simple democratic tasks, like, say, voting.
Speaking of which, why is voting a right? Doesn't counting several million ballots require "significant effort"? I certainly couldn't do it in an afternoon! Are you "enslaved" by having to pay for people to count ballots?
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/what-happened-t...