ABSTRACT
Professor Peters's admirable essay has two primary aims: (1) to articulate more clearly a widely prized ideal of character and (2) to consider how that particular personal excellence can be 'learned,' or at least fostered by a certain kind of institutional environment. The character trait in question is one that shares the glittering name of 'freedom' with a puzzling variety of other things that are not virtues of character, among them, a certain class of institutional arrangements and control systems. By analyzing the ideal of the free man, on the one hand, and the nature of a free social system, on the other, Peters hoped to be in a better position to illuminate the connection between the two in a way that will be useful for the purposes of educational policy and congruent with the results of psychological learning theory. I think that these purposes of Peters's have been largely achieved by his essay, and therefore I will restrict my comments to a related topic that he had to pass over.
