Why is Ayn Rand not taught in schools?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi
Why is Ayn Rand not taught in schools? Is it the anti-spiritualism of Objectivism
“Objectivism rejects belief in anything alleged to transcend existence.[16]”

or the “rational self-interest”
from wikipedia:

“Rand characterized Objectivism as “a philosophy for living on earth”, grounded in reality, and aimed at defining human nature and the nature of the world in which we live.[8]”
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged[11]”

I would like to get an objective/neutral critique of her philosophy and find out why it is objectionable to so many? I look forward to your feedback
davidmich

2

She chose to expound on her philosophy in novels, and those novels are generally considered to be poor examples of the form. I think the quality of her writing precludes her from being taught in literature classes.

Her philosophy is an almalgamation of stuff that was developed by other philosophers earlier, so most of what she had to say is covered in a Philosophy 101 course.

3

Why do you think it would be?

As literature? It is generally though to be bad, poorly written literature.

As ideology? Schools are not supposed to be in the business of pushing particular ideologies (and, as many people find it to be a hateful ideology, I am sure there would be many objections from parents, etc.) I suppose it could be justified if it were taught in a comparative way, with equivalent classes on, say, Marxism, Christianity, and other ideological systems (most of which have far more followers than Rand does). However, that sort of thing is usually left until the university level, where students are much more likely to have developed sufficient intellectual maturity to deal with such complex matters.

4

Simple. She isn’t a good writer nor is she a relevant writer, the two main reasons books are taught in schools.

5

I think it should be taught in the sense that “Here is this 1000-page book that you won’t be able to avoid because your most annoying friends will be quoting it all the time. There will be a test, but don’t try to mooch any information about it from me because I’m not here to live for your sake.”

6

njtt. Where does it state that her philosophy was hateful? I have no found

“She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral[3] and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights.[4] In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for some Aristotelians and classical liberals.[5]”

“She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and dictatorship.[1”

http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/NathanielBranden/BenefitsAndHazards.html
Objectivism teaches:

  1. That reality is what it is, that things are what they are, independent of anyone’s beliefs, feelings, judgments or opinions – that existence exists, that A is A;
    2.That reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the various senses, is fully competent, in principle, to understand the facts of reality;
    3.That any form of irrationalism, supernaturalism, or mysticism, any claim to a nonsensory, nonrational form of knowledge, is to be rejected;
  2. That a rational code of ethics is possible and is derivable from an appropriate assessment of the nature of human beings as well as the nature of reality;
  3. That the standard of the good is not God or the alleged needs of society but rather “Man’s life,” that which is objectively required for man’s or woman’s life, survival, and well-being;
  4. That a human being is an end in him- or herself, that each one of us has the right to exist for our own sake, neither sacrificing others to self nor self to others;
  5. That the principles of justice and respect for individuality autonomy, and personal rights must replace the principle of sacrifice in human relationships;
  6. That no individual – and no group – has the moral right to initiate the use of force against others;
  7. That force is permissible only in retaliation and only against those who have initiated its use;
  8. That the organizing principle of a moral society is respect for individual rights and that the sole appropriate function of government is to act as guardian and protector of individual rights.
    So, Rand was a champion and advocate of reason, self-interest individual rights, and political and economic freedom. She advocated a total separation of state and economics, just as – and for the same reason as – we now have the separation of state and church. She took the position, and it is a position I certainly share, that just as the government has no proper voice in the religious beliefs or practices of people, provided no one else’s rights are violated, so there should be freedom or production and trade between and among consenting adults.
7

I had to read Anthem for a high school English class (think it was 10th grade.) Being someone who reads a lot of fiction, especially science fiction, I found it boring and generally poorly-written. My brother had to read either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged for an AP English course. Whichever it was, he found it to be terribly written, boring crap (and this is a guy who now has a PhD in English.) So they are taught as literature (and I’m being generous here.) But to actually discuss Objectivism as a philosophy requires a course that high schools simply don’t offer, at least not to the majority of students. I took several years of high school level Great Books courses as a gifted student and Rand never came up once.

There were any number of books I had to read in school that I didn’t care for. The difference is, nobody tried to make anything by, say, Thomas Hardy into a philosophy to run for Congress on.

8

I mean, it’s worth bringing up as it’s apparently a fairly important guiding line for many of our politicians… But beyond that? It’s shoddy literature, antisocial ideology, and generally awful.

9

Ok. Budget Player Cadet. it is anti-social. That’s one good reason.

10

Because she’s a bitch.

You say her philosophy was not hateful, but the very first thing it says, right there, is that it embraced egoism and rejected altruism. She made an entire philosophy that celebrated selfishness. Her morality was completely bankrupt. John Galt’s motto of extreme individualism and self-interest without loyalty or community is (A) abominable and (B) hardly even needs to be taught nowadays. If anything, this is a lesson that our generation has learned too well, to its cost. She rejects any form of shared social responsibility or resources. There is also a pretty notorious scene where she implies 300 people deserved to die because they didn’t follow her ideology. And from a literary standpoint, there is no substance to the book. It’s just a platform for espousing her own hideous pseudophilosophical babble.

But anyway, let’s take her lesson and apply it to our situation: I believe it is in my own rational self-interest to teach my children not to be assholes. I believe the best way to accomplish this is to teach them to do the opposite of anything Ayn Rand thought about anything.

Also, my own personal code of self-interested morality, if liberated from any sense of restraint, empathy, or government oppression, would dictate that it is virtuous to find people who like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and punch them in the face.

11

Thanks Chihuahua. I wasn’t aware of that.
davidmich

12

We read The Fountainhead and Anthem in my senior year, honors English class at a public high school. This was the early 1970s in the US. That English course was actually a 2-year honors course consisting of a survey of English Literature. We did the pre-19th century stuff in the junior year and the modern stuff in the senior year.

13

Wow. You guys are taking the whole anti-Rand thing to the next level here.

14

Rand’s philosophy was trite and morally stunted. Her writing was repetitive and dull.

But I think that schools should cover Objectivism, and Socialism and Capitalism and all the other -isms as part of a well rounded education. But to single out Rand as some sort of special case… I don’t see how that’s warranted.

15

When I was a teen it was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, which from its title I figured was some kind of a parody book. But no, it’s some kind of hippie philosophy thing.

*Not 1000 pages either

16

Moving this to IMHO from General Questions.

samclem, moderator

17

Yeah, that and The Dancing Wu LI Masters :rolleyes:

18

Libertarians quote Ayn Rand. Therefore, I need not read anything she ever wrote.

19

Pretty much for the same reasons the works of her intellectual peer L. Ron Hubbard aren’t studied in school.

Apart from Whittaker Chambers’ magnificent takedown of the old fraud in 1957,
Big Sister Is Watching You,
So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the air, “over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).

there is a libertarian ( Austrian School ) detailing of the cult by Murray N. Rothbard, ( I may disagree with him on most things, but he wrote exquisitely on such people as Marx and Miss Rand ),
******The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. “It’s about time for you to start reading it again,” he admonished. “I have already read Atlas thirty-five times.”

*The rereading of Atlas was also important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian. Just as every Christian is supposed to aim at the imitation of Christ in his own daily life, so every Randian was supposed to aim at the imitation of John Galt (Rand’s hero of heroes in Atlas). He was always supposed to ask himself in every situation “What would John Galt have done?” When we remind ourselves that Jesus, after all, was an actual historical figure whereas Galt was not, the bizarrerie of this injunction can be readily grasped. (Although from the awed way Randians spoke of John Galt, one often got the impression that, for them, the line between fiction and reality was very thin indeed.) *

And that essay by Vladimir Shlapentokh, ( non-communist ) The Marxist and Bolshevik Roots of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy, which demonstrates that intellectually and emotionally her thought was crude mere Bolshevist materialism.

[ Then to be fair, so is much modern right wing and left wing thought of today, but mostly conservatives from the Tea Party to the GOP etc. — the left in so far as they influence anything are more heirs to the New Left than the Old Masters; Marx and Lenin. ]

Now we begin the process of the deconstruction of Rand’s views. The role of materialism in the philosophy of Marx and Rand can be used as a good starting point. Rand advocated in her writing as a materialist, not doing any less in that regard than Marx. The latter seems, however, by several orders of magnitude a more sophisticated philosopher, as he thoroughly knew the German philosophy, with its deep interest in the complexities of the process of cognition. The main principle of the philosophy of “objectivism” Rand formulated as: “Facts are facts and are independent of human feelings, desires, hopes or fears.” Adjacent to the other premise – a principle of the “identity” – “A is A”, meaning that “the fact is a fact” (the third part of “Atlas Shrugged” is subtitles “A is A”) strikes with primitivism, as well as her critique of Kant. Only Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirico Criticism published in 1908, had a philosophy almost exactly like Rand’s which was formulated a half-century later: “Consciousness is the mirror image of reality.” Any further than Lenin, the layman in philosophy, though educated for those times, Rand did not go.
One of Rand’s challenges, apparently, was to confirm that the vulgar Marxist image of the capitalist, as described by the great proletarian writer Gorki in The Land of the Yellow Devil, or famous Russian poet Marshak in “Mister Twister,” is truly just. Rand’s heroes celebrate what Marxists charged capitalists with being – selfish, with a lack of interest in the public good and an indifference to the suffering of others. According the Rand, a different behavior undermines the promotion of human activities; humans should not be wasting emotion on anything other than augmenting their number of dollars – a clear criterion for the success of human activity.
“One who does not work, does not eat” is a pervasive idea found among the Bolsheviks and in Rand’s works. There is no doubt that this slogan was one of the most popular after the revolution in Russia, as was well known to Alice Rosenbaum. In fact, the main pathos of Rand’s major books is an echo of this slogan in the form of the uncompromising condemnation of “unearned income” and parasites of all kind. But it was the Bolsheviks who, for the first time in the history of law, had introduced the concept of “parasite” and severely persecuted those who did not get a salary. Rand definitely knew this. The Bolsheviks did not recognize the revenue from those activities that are condemned. The concept of social parasites is widely used by both Rand’s heroes and the Soviet people (incidentally, the poet Brodsky was declared a parasite). The character Rearden in Atlas sternly condemns her brother Philip for not working. Likewise, the Soviet government did not allow women to “sit at home” unless she had children under the age of three. No amount of “sacrifice” on behalf of the relatives was taken into account by the authorities.
Rand’s views were formed under the influence of Bolshevism, its ideology, and its practice. Many of Rand’s admirers are delighted with how she has consistently opposed the sympathy and assistance to people who were not contributing to the “industrial production.” The denial of compassion, as the main enemy of progress, Rand could have learned not so much from Nietzsche as from the Bolsheviks, who taught the people of Petrograd in the early 1920s many lessons of ruthlessness toward people. Bolshevik texts such as Lenin’s speeches before the publication advocates of the 1920s and 1930s were filled with hatred for the internal and external enemies, parasites evading “socially useful work.” The oath of the pioneer, which I solemnly gave at the pioneer lineup on Nov. 5, 1936, focused on the promise to be “ruthless” to the enemies of the revolution.

It is a beautiful essay.

20

I think part of the strong reaction is two-part.
First is that a good number of people find her philosophy morally repugnant, but the aggravating factor is that she has her supporters to what some see as patently unsupportable.

To give a completely over the top example, to some it feels kind of like meeting someone who casually says “Sure, Jeffery Dhamer may have crossed the line in some peoples eyes, but from a purely logical perspective, murdering and eating young men has it’s good points as well.”