Equality, Education, And The Race Of Life
In a recent viral clip, a man using aggressively charismatic youth-speak instructs a group of high schoolers to line up in a grass field for a race, where the winner gets a $100 bill. It’s made clear that this race also represents the race of life: the winners end up healthy, rich, and happy; the losers, well, aren’t. Everyone starts shoulder to shoulder on the same starting line, but then the leader makes adjustments. “Take two steps forward if both of your parents are still married…take two steps forward if you grew up with a father figure…take two steps forward if you never wondered where your next meal was going to come from.” By the end, some people are already halfway to the finish line before the race has even started.
It’s a powerful metaphor for how many forms of privilege make life an unfair race, but it misses something: what about the people with hay fever who couldn’t even show up? Why not move the race to a local track with no such allergens? In other words, what if this race is not only unfair in practice, but it isn’t even the race we should be running in the first place?
The tension between freedom and equality is a common theme of political philosophy. The American Left and Right basically agree: The Right holds that a free society will have some unavoidable and entirely natural inequality, and the Left acknowledges that an equal society requires some sacrifice of individual liberties. But an alternative view, advanced most notably by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, is that these two values are often complementary and even codependent.
This idea seems obvious in some ways, especially to people that devote significant brain space to social justice. After all, African Americans could not be equal citizens even in name until they had the freedom to vote. Marriage equality is a more recent example. A less obvious family of examples relates to the freedom to play society’s game in the first place. Wheelchair-accessible buildings are a great example of this idea.
A society that provides food, housing, and in-home care to wheelchair-bound people might be equal by some metric of material wellbeing. But its fundamental attitude would be, as Anderson put it in her influential 1999 paper in Ethics, that the wheelchair-disabled are inherently “defective” members of society that must depend on the “vastly superior abilities” of the productive.
This society assumes the wheelchair-bound are stuck in their bedrooms with the metaphorical hay fever, unable to participate in the race of life. It assumes that they cannot play; it never considers that, in a slightly different game, they could not only play, but actually win. Although our society’s actions may differ from this hypothetical one’s, its mindset is more similar than we like to admit.
Consider the education system. When children or young adults with dyslexia, some degree of autism, or other defined “learning disabilities” receive their diagnoses, they are saddled with the implicit verdict that they will not be able to run the educational race, or at least face a significant disadvantage. If that game is learning material in the same way and in the same environment as people without those conditions, then those diagnoses are correct. But they shouldn’t have to play that exact version of the game. Moving from the field to the track doesn’t disadvantage those without hay fever; it just lets more people run.
It’s true that educating people with these conditions often requires more individualized attention, more space, and more resources. Specialized reading programs, tutors that work to find better individualized learning paths for students, and behavioral therapy do not materialize without effort or money. However, some tweaks to the game are simple. For example, the florescent lighting in many schools, easily replaceable with softer lighting, is quite disturbing and distracting for many children on the Autism spectrum. Making audio versions of class readings or even exam questions available is easy yet transformative for many dyslexic students.
These tweaks are not handouts and they do not hold others back to make things “fair.” Being able to race is more than a personal victory; people that depend on society under the current rules suddenly become contributors. Competition has many benefits, and despite its drawbacks, it’s something humanity will always engage in. Given this reality, we must recognize that not everyone competes in the same way, nor should they. A race that accommodates these differences becomes a more equal one simply by freeing previous non-participants to compete on the same level as everyone else.
Jon Niewijk ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at jniewijk@wustl.edu.