ABSTRACT
It is not simply an accident that the United States and the Soviet Union, two states which are based on opposite political and economic principles and conceptions of the nature of man, both place a very high value on the process of education. Historians have often speculated about the reasons for the success of the English, comparative latecomers to America, in the struggle for domination with other European powers which appeared in the early seventeenth century to be much more firmly established in North America. In spite of the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s, the American people has only limited faith in the benefits of social engineering, an approach to politics that has perhaps been most fully expressed in the policies of Scandinavian social democracy. Before such an approach could be widely accepted, Americans would also have to accept that deep-rooted inequality existed in the United States.
