ABSTRACT
Bruce A. Ackerman begins his discussion of education and nurture with the arresting statement that children are born "radically incomplete." Ackerman understands politics as a straggle to possess or control "power." "The authoritarian," says Ackerman "exploits the child's cultural dependence to limit his cultural freedom." But Ackerman thinks that teaching scales and keys and time signatures and such is akin to mass-production. Rather than diversity of melody, he would have noise. Yet on a first reading of Ackerman's treatise, the difference between the two interpretations of the counsel is blurred. Three different clouds obscure it: the ambiguity of the phrase "conception of the good"; eccentric definitions of liberal and authoritarian education; and Ackerman's use of metaphor. As an honorific term, "liberal education" is reserved for teaching that avoids ideals as though they were infectious diseases; only neutralism is liberal. Indeed, apparently Ackerman himself is too nearly a true liberal at heart to observe his neutralist vows with any real consistency.
