Can someone explain Ayn Rand to me?!

any high school teacher who makes The Fountainhead a requirement ought to be fired.

no way. anything that inspires thought/discussion/argument is a-ok to read circa high school.

ie i don't think she really understood capitalism. capital is not 'heroic'

and i dunno, her heroicization of fat cats doesn't make less sense of marx's heroicization of the worker

any high school teacher who makes The Fountainhead a requirement ought to be fired.

no way. anything that inspires thought/discussion/argument is a-ok to read circa high school.

― a CRASBO is a "criminally related" ASBO (contenderizer), Friday, August 13, 2010 12:32 PM (2 minutes ago)

high school is far too short and there are waaaayyyy too many books that are actually good to spend time making teenagers read The Fountainhead.

working isn't heroic either!

ayn rand is turning into l. ron hubbard

high school is far too short and there are waaaayyyy too many books that are actually good to spend time making teenagers read The Fountainhead.

i guess, but it's one of the those books that teens, or certain teens, really seem to take so, which counts in its favor

i would LOVE to have read it in high school, just for the ensuing debates

ayn rand is turning into l. ron hubbard

I had to read Anthem in high school. it came across as a self-aware Choose Your Own Adventure book however with all the choices predetermined for you :(

We had enough debates with the following:

Siddhartha
Death In Venice
The Stranger
Johnny Got His Gun
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Sula
Going After Cacciato
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Jungle
Heart of Darkness

I can't imagine throwing The Fountainhead in there, too

yeah, i'm no Ayn Rand fan on any level -- but i wouldn't object to having the fountainhead being read in a high school class. it isn't any more controversial than a lot of the books Dan just listed (though there is the rough sex/quasi-rape scenes which may not go over very well).

\it isn't any more controversial than a lot of the books Dan just listed

the difference is that the Fountainhead is REALLY SHITTILY WRITTEN whereas most of the books Dan listed are actually really well written

What?? You read those in high school? Holy shit. I can never tell if I missed all the notable literature b/c I took mostly science classes, or if my school was just crappy.

I mean with those other books you can delve into the style and composition and metaphors and whatnot, there's a range of analytical approaches you can take. with Ayn Rand it's strictly "how stupid/awesome do you think this poorly presented philosophy is"

well, "shittily written" is in the eye of the beholder. i don't think much of Upton Sinclair or Hermann Hesse as writers, either.

I don't really have any objection to teaching Rand in high school other than do you really want to give teenagers justification to act even more like narcissistic dicks?

I read about half that list in high school (either for AP history or for AP English) - although my list subbed the Invisible Man, All the King's Men, some others I'm forgetting at the moment...

x-post

i don't think much of Upton Sinclair or Hermann Hesse as writers, either.

I'll concede on Sinclair - Hesse tho? he was a much better stylist than Ayn Rand

I think we read the Plague instead of the Stranger

it's like, you already think you're the most important person in the world and should be able to do whatever you want, now here's a "grown-up" "philosophy" that says it's OK, go out and have fun!

wait, the invisible man by h.g. wells or am i to understand that you were taught ellison's invisible man in high school, in which case i am super-impressed and kind of awed?

upton sinclair has the advantage of being vv important and influential w/r/t actual issues of his day

again, matter of taste re Hesse. not to mention that there may be translation issues (German --> English, and all that).

Ellison (lol didn't read the Wells one until college for a genre fiction class). I think we spent like a whole quarter on it, it looms large in my memory.

xp

They should introduce The Most Dangerous Game into the schools

I forgot Native Son and Black Boy

there was also a Louise Erdman book but I can't remember what it was because it was super super boring

of course upton sinclair is a better stylist than ayn rand! i realize this stuff is subjective but ayn rand is suuuuuch a shitty writer.

upton sinclair has the advantage of being vv important and influential w/r/t actual issues of his day

^^^this. which is why we read it in US history instead of English, iirc

oh shit yeah we read Native Son too.

Light in August was another one.

am i to understand that you were taught ellison's invisible man in high school, in which case i am super-impressed and kind of awed?

we read the invisible man, wasn't even an AP class

public school in spokane fucking washington, too (redneck central)

sorta figured it was part of the standard american curriculum

no?

it is really not standard! maybe i am naive to be shocked but that is a super-hard book!

light in august is quite a book for hs too

totes. i <3 that one, would have loved to have read it in high school.

do a lot of ppl read 'death in venice' in HS? because that one stands out as far and away the most difficult of those texts, both style-wise and theme-wise.

ayn rand is so bad...i think my mom used to be into her work waaaay back when she was younger but now she finds her pretty reprehensible.

i certainly did not read death in venice in high school

we really just did shakespeare
macbeth
julius caesar
king lear

and also

pride and prejudice
oedipus the king

big focus on poetry in ireland tho

aye thee ould whiskey
and me sheep
make me life
complete

i certainly did not read death in venice in high school

10th grade IIRC

It was kind of an extra credit program concocted by our honors English teacher to combat the extreme boredom of some of us (two of whom now moderate this board, lol)

this horrible English teacher at my high school taught a senior elective called "political lit" only it turns out he was a crazy libertarian. as far as i know, the only female author he ever assigned in that class was ayn rand. >:[

can't even believe all these fancy books y'all read in high school

high school is just plain fucked up

at any rate re: Rand, I still stand by what I wrote upthread; regardless of how terrible we find her in 2010, I have at least one concrete example of how she inspired a dude facing a lot of discrimination and economic hardship growing up to get a PhD and run a lab for a Fortune 100 company and it was all very beneficial to my life as a child, so I am not going to hate

oh yeah we did a bunch of Shakespeare too - Macbeth stands out as the most memorable, cuz we were shown bits of the Polanski version and the Orson Welles version (which is awesome) in its entirety. Also Othello, something else... not Hamlet

oh yeah Midsummer Night's Dream

tbh i was one of the worst students of all time and basically never did homework ever (one of my best friends used to boast about not even owning copybooks for loads of subjects) and i used to just bring my own books to class and read them and wait for school to be over for good. i'm still so glad it is!

a terrible man for the studying

we werent allowed watch the polanski version bc my teacher said "unlike in the ACTUAL PLAY they show duncan being murdered, and i know that most of you wont bother reading this or even paying attn. to me right now or ever. but i cant deal w/ reading any essays where you describe the murder scene"

we did Julius Caesar in 9th grade, no Shakespeare in 10th grade (American lit), King Lear in 11th grade (best ever), and then senior year was electives and some years a Shakespeare elective was offered, but not my senior year.

it's like, you already think you're the most important person in the world and should be able to do whatever you want, now here's a "grown-up" "philosophy" that says it's OK, go out and have fun!

OTM. It's just a philosophy which allows people to put a fancy name on self-serving, self-congratulatory asshole behaviour. No wonder so many celebrities are fans - they have the same sense of entitlement as your average teenager. I fucking hate Ayn Rand.