Jake Frackson – The Equity of Ideas
The Value of the Student Voice
What if the weight of your opinion did not matter on your ethnicity, social status, age, or any other superficial characteristic? Or in other words, what if your ideas were based on their content, and not their designer? Now that’s what I would call progress, and Student Voice, a student-led initiative empowering student involvement internationally, would entirely agree.
What if the weight of your opinion did not matter on your ethnicity, social status, age, or any other superficial characteristic? Or in other words, what if your ideas were based on their content, and not their designer? Now that’s what I would call progress, and Student Voice, a student-led initiative empowering student involvement internationally, would entirely agree.
Malala Yousafzai, a school-aged proponent of women’s rights and a recent victim of the Taliban in Pakistan, is a great example of this progress at work. For all her life very little was expected of Malala: she was a girl, she was young, and she was Pakistani. But regardless of that, she made a difference. She made her voice heard, she overcame oppression, and she propelled forward the case for universal female education. Malala Yousafzai’s value was not based on superficial characteristics, but by the weight of her character.
John Rawl phrased this utopia well in his work, A Theory of Justice. In this work he presented the ideal world as what he called the “Original Position.” Here, the world was minority-less. The political structure of this model was designed behind what Rawl called “The Veil of Ignorance.” This divider separated the designer from all superficial