From Rothbard’s “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor”:
If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individuated personality of his own.
I recommend the full article:
It is the intense egalitarian drive of the New Left that accounts, furthermore, for its curious theory of education — a theory that has made such an enormous impact on the contemporary student movement in American universities in recent years. The theory holds that, in contrast to “old-fashioned” concepts of education, the teacher knows no more than any of his students. All, then, are “equal” in condition; one is no better in any sense than any other. Since only an imbecile would actually proclaim that the student knows as much about the content of any given discipline as his professor, this claim of equality is sustained by arguing for the abolition of content in the classroom. This content, asserts the New Left, is “irrelevant” to the student and hence not a proper part of the educational process. The only proper subject for the classroom is not a body of truths, not assigned readings or topics, but open-ended, free-floating participatory discussion of the student’s feelings, since only his feelings are truly “relevant” to the student. And since the lecture method implies, of course, that the lecturing professor knows more than the students to whom he imparts knowledge, the lecture too must go. Such is the caricature of “education” propounded by the New Left.
