A closer look at the Texas Board of Education recommendations
we should take a closer look at Charles de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Aquinas. The board has requested that students now be able to “explain the impact” of their work on contemporary government. Their lessons are perhaps more apt for our times than the board has acknowledged.
…
Finally, we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), […]: “Under bad governments … equality is only apparent and illusory. It serves merely to maintain the poor man in his misery and the rich man is his usurpation. In actuality, laws are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those who have nothing. Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as they all have something and none of them have too much.” In other words, it is not enough to proclaim all is equal; the government must strive to make that equality real in its deeds, which means evening out the distribution of wealth.
So the board is to be congratulated for its keen and renewed commitment to social equality as a way of sustaining this great democratic republic.