The year 1776 was a vintage one for freedom. It brought forth the master work of Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith. Everybody has rights and everybody should do his own thing. The concept of liberty which came out of the enlightened eighteenth century and achieved wide popularity in the nineteenth has lost ground in the twentieth. The great utopian appeal of collectivism, even in the modern extremes of fascism and communism, is the fond hope of equality.
Collectivism proclaims high ideals and promises reforms.
Literacy and public enlightenment are laudable goals for us to undertake in public education. There is profound danger in cultivating the cult of equality. Toequeville, the great admirer of American democracy, warned of the danger during his travels in the United States in the Jackson era. Democracy would, he foresaw, pose an irreconcilable dilemma to Americans. They who treasured both freedom and equality would eventually choose to give up the former to gain the latter.