The one about Will Lynch and individualism

"When this opposition between truth and freedom becomes explicit, both sides (the right and the left) wax philosophical and produce theories about the nature of truth and freedom. The right usually offers a theory according to which, if you have truth, freedom will follow automatically. Human beings, says this theory, have within them a truth-tracking faculty called ‘reason’, and instrument capable of uncovering the intrinsic nature of things. Once such obstacles as the passions or sin are overcome, the natural light of reason will guide us to the truth. Deep within our souls there is a spark that the right sort of education can fan into flame. Once the soul is afire with love of truth, freedom will follow --- for freedom consists of one’s capacity to be rational. So, the right concludes, only the truth can make us free."
-Richard Rorty

This line of thinking; truth first, freedom later, is the conventional thinking of most Americans. The phrase “The truth shall set you free” is a colloquialism that isn’t often heard among inmates, because it is inherently wrong. The thinking behind this is what you learn and the knowledge you obtain can lead to the true freedom of the mind. This is a problem because many things we know now were not accepted three thousand years ago. Anyone from Galileo to Copernicus to Socrates can vouch for this.

“This Platonic picture of education as the awakening of the true self can easily be adapted to the needs of the left. The left dismisses Platonic ascetism and exalts Socratic social criticism. It identifies the obstacles to freedom and education must overcome not with the passions or with sin but with convention and prejudice. What the right calls ‘overcoming the passions’, the left calls ‘stifling healthy animal instincts’. What the right thinks of as the triumph of reason, the left describes as the triumph of acculturation --- acculturation engineered by the powers that be. What the right describes as civilizing the young, the left describes as alienating them from their true selves. In the tradition of Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault, the left pictures society as depriving the young of their freedom and of their essential humanity so that they may function as frictionless cogs in a vast, inhuman socioeconomic machine. So, for the left, the proper function of education is to make the young realize that they should not consent to this alienating process of socialization. On the leftist’s inverted version of Plato, if you take care of freedom --- especially political and ecnomic freedom --- truth will take care of itself. For truth is what will be believed once the alienating and repressive forces of society are removed.”
-Richard Rorty

The fact that this quotation begins with calling the train of thought “Platonic” instead of “the right” already skews this in the way of correctness. However the idea of freedom first, truth later is also flawed. No one can obtain freedom without truth. The principle, however, makes a lot more sense. You actually have the freedom to learn new things and aren’t fed the same things that the generations before you had been fed.