I teach English to 11th graders in one of the top-ranked public high schools in the country. I’ve a pretty solid idea about how and what pulls out interesting and rigorous ideas from that set, as opposed to sound and fury.
Manda JO teaches English - AP English in one of the country’s top high schools. She probably has a pretty good understanding of young minds.
I had to read Anthem in Junior Year, also. We read it as SF, not as some sort of philosophy we should follow. It was boring.
Because the teaching of evil is generally disapproved by local school boards. Rand taught how to be ruthless, uncompromising, unempathic, greedy and self-centered and made her fiction to justify it. It was weak as literature and weaker as philosophy and has only been adopted by the ruthless, uncompromising, unempathic, greedy and self-centered to justify their personal failings of character and screwing people.
If you want to teach evil, remember that Machiavelli’s The Prince taught all the same lessons five hundred years earlier, probably as a parody because they were contrary to his more thoughtful Discourses. It is well written and nobody takes it as serious thought except Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger and their like. Remember it is a list of things that you should not attempt yourself, but can be adapted/plagiarized for plot points in a soap opera villain, a la Breaking Bad for great entertainment.
In short, if you want to be a self-serving evil fuck, pick up The Prince and don’t take up architecture or fictional metallurgy. Rand nuts are merely more successful than LaRoucheies because she isn’t still alive to demand people kick up.
Why does this not surprise us one bit…
Ayn Rand (her philosophy, not her literature) should be taught, along with other philosophies, to university freshmen, who can then discuss it to death at night in their dorm rooms, and then be utterly humiliated by their parents when they come home at Thanksgiving, because their parents had the same discussions when they were in college and have 30 years more life experience in learning how full of shit Ayn Rand actually is.
I may be the only one here who actually enjoyed reading Atlas Shrugged…and also have zero respect for the philosophical ideas in it. The book is almost entirely morally bankrupt.
There is a nice speech, early on, where one of the characters talks about money. It’s actually fairly reasonable. Of course, it’s far from original with Rand; it’s essentially a platitude and largely tautologous.
Another episode in the book is of some interest: it’s where a train is about to go into a tunnel, even though most of the people on-site know it’s too dangerous. It’s an interesting fictionalized analysis of an industrial disaster. Perhaps if the staff at Chernobyl had read it, things might have gone differently.
(The episode is immediately ruined by the list of all of the casualties of the disaster, all of whom are nasty, evil, bad, wicked, sinister beneficiaries of statism. Rand didn’t have the intellectual courage to depict good and innocent people being hurt in a train accident.)
I took a political philosophy course during sophomore year of college. We read some of Ayn Rand’s (alleged) non-fiction. We also read selections from real philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, etc… The contrast between Ayn Rand’s childish ramblings and the works of the real philosophers was quite large and very obvious.
In short, few professors assign her books because her books just aren’t very good. For an intelligent and spirited defense of free markets, there are many better authors out there. F. A. Hayak and Milton Friedman would be the two that come to mind for me.
My son’s homeschool curriculum for tenth grade had both Anthem and A Separate Peace - I’m sending him back to public school 
(Had we home schooled him, I’d have chosen a different curriculum for 10th grade English - no one should ever be forced to read A Separate Peace. I liked the 9th grade English choices a lot - Our Town, Animal Farm, Wizard of Earthsea and To Kill a Mockingbird.)
A-Freakin’-Men!
Exact same experience around the exact same time. Aside from the 2-year course structure thing. So I’d say it is taught, in some schools.
Anthem was assigned reading for my class in eighth grade.
Friedman was required reading in lower division economics classes when I was a lad. These were radio addresses. They may have been economics, they came close to political philosophy. Krugman generally complains that Friedman passed off his polemics (Free to Choose the radio addresses and columns) as economics, although Krugman seems to be doing the exact same thing. Krugman does have a great deal of praise for Friedman’s serious academic writings on economics.
I was a young Objectivist. I did the essay contests in high school.
I just don’t think the material is that good or relevant to anything taught in school. I don’t think there’s some conspiracy or specific effort against it.
There are a lot of famous writers with best-sellers that aren’t taught in school. And there are certainly well-regarded novels that ARE taught in school that don’t conform to establishment philosophy/politics.
Of all of the 20th century writers/thinkers who are widely known but are not taught in school, Rand is at best in the middle of a very large pack. There are plenty of people of an opposing philosophy who are also not taught in school, from Russell to Galbraith to Lewis, who are probably of even more merit… For a person to even raise the question, singling out one writer, it is clearly an attempt to garner adulation for her in a public forum, as if she doesn’t already have a surfeit.
Truly, Rand is ethical bankrupt.
She stole her entire philosophy from Marx, but flipped the roles.
Could this be because she was a neurotic White Russian?
Or because she was a shrill, clingy, needy drunk?
Who cares?
In my humble opinion it’s because her books suck.
I can see them being on an “optional reading” list, but they aren’t worth the limited time school provides.
Excellent choice.
It gets an airing in freshman philosophy courses, as you’d imagine. Thing is, the profs are beyond dismissive and are actually teaching the debunking of such thought. Most students had stumbled onto it in high school. Personally, I think it’s more fun that way!
This is certainly very objectionable. I had no idea she had said it.
Ayn Rand on Native Americans:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Ayn_Rand
“[The Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using… What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent.” * Source: “Q and A session following her Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974”