Self-Reliance vs. Self-Esteem

For Emerson esteemers : Self-Reliance vs. Self-Esteem, by 

Michael Knox Beran

America’s first great public intellectual, he breathed new life into methods of educating young people that have their origin in the earliest epochs of our national history and that, until not all that long ago, occupied a central place in the American classroom. More important, his vision of the goal of education—the nurturing of independent and sturdily self-reliant individuals—is a particularly American, and a particularly valuable, ideal. (…)

(City Journal, Winter 2004, Vol. 14, No. 1)