A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a ‘culture’ is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions. — AYN RAND
When her daughter Susan started kindergarten in Virginia in 1972, Jessie Wise quickly heard complaints from Susan’s teacher that the child would become a social misfit because she wanted to read during free time instead of playing. This was not good news for...
Most are thankful to God. I am thankful to man — specifically, to those individuals who (over the centuries) have created the countless things I need for survival and enjoyment: automobiles, plumbing, mass produced food, medicine, electricity, computers, televisions … the list is endless.
The settlement of the Microsoft anti-trust case got interesting this week — and developments revealed the laughably absurd nature of much of the suit against the company. Reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere revealed that...
Nothing is an outrage when the reigning fad is being non-judgmental. So perhaps it is not surprising that there has been no nationwide chorus of condemnation of Bill Clinton’s anti-American speech at Georgetown University. According to the former president,...
In a world where the media are ready to magnify innocuous remarks or a minor problem into a trauma or a disaster, there is remarkably little attention being paid to cruelties routinely inflicted on children by our laws and our courts. That cruelty is ripping children...
The events of September 11 have been the primary subject of discussion on college campuses across America. A patriotic fervor has been revived, with flags popping up in virtually every yard and on every car. However, after reading the editorials that appeared in last...
It was September 14. Washington, D.C., had been attacked, and one of its most prominent monuments had been burned by the enemy. A Washington lawyer sat in the early morning gloom and fretted over the fate of his country. The year was 1814, the burned monument was the...
When the new school year begins, Deena Esteban will not be among the legions of educators welcoming students back to class. That’s because Mrs. Esteban, a 43-year-old art teacher in Prince William County, Va., lost the job she loved after being convicted of a...
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the alternative to state regulation is not a regulatory void, but a range of voluntary arrangements.”
A 4-year-old boy died last weekend at the Malibu home of rock star Tommy Lee. How any right-thinking parents could entrust their child to a drug-addled celebrity who pled no contest to kicking his ex-wife (actress Pamela Anderson) while she held their newborn baby is...
American education will never be improved until we address a problem seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is teacher philosophy and incompetency. If we were serious about efforts to improve public education, we’d shut down schools of education. Why?...
You must stand tall for moral principles and the dignity of man. Award the Olympics to a country where rights are protected, not to the Butchers of Beijing.
On Friday (June 29, 2001), ABC news correspondent John Stossel aired a hard-hitting report challenging the environmentalist movement and suggesting that “tampering with nature” makes human life better — that such “unnatural” phenomena as...
The eminent philosopher Ayn Rand once observed that the really major battle in our time is not between capitalism and Communism. The really major battle is between capitalism and altruism.
Q : My wife and I want to teach our four-year-old son to have self-confidence. How can we teach him? A: This is too vast a subject to appropriately answer in a short column. I can, however, give you some general principles. Here they are: Make sure you are confident...
Finding a career to be passionate about is like finding the love of your life.
There’s nothing like stiff competition to bring out the worst in government. Nowhere does this prove more true than in the battle between home-schooling parents and public school bureaucrats. In Maryland, local prosecutors are moving forward with a...
If we had to single out one American institution that stands at the forefront of modern-day racial discrimination, deception and contempt for fundamental principles of liberty, it would be America’s universities. Under the euphemisms of affirmative action,...
No wonder the California Teachers Association was howling. Ray Haynes actually wanted them to practice what they preach. Haynes, a Republican state senator from California, recently introduced legislation in Sacramento that would have required public school teachers...
Fear of failure — you hear psychologists on “Oprah,” and elsewhere, talk about it all the time. What actually is it? Fear of failure is simply what it self-evidently appears to be. It is the fear of not achieving your goal or value in some context...
Our colleges are losing touch with reality. The padded grades they’re giving out don’t help our students. Harvey C. Mansfield teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. And if there were a class in “how to get yourself into trouble with your...
It should be obvious after reading Leftism Revisited that no party or system is ever 100 percent Left or Right. It’s a question of what predominates, and where we are headed.
People ask me all the time how they can develop proper tools of self-confidence. Allow me to save you a few steps. THERE IS NO BETTER TOOL OF SELF CONFIDENCE THAN COMING UP WITH A REALISTIC PLAN OF ACTION AND THEN FOLLOWING THROUGH ON IT, OVER A PERIOD OF MONTHS AND...
Is it possible to take a moral inventory of our culture — to see, in a single event, what, if anything, the most influential parts of our culture hold as the good? There is an important forum in which we take such an inventory every year at this time — and...
Test scores are not the only things that tell us how bad our public schools have become. In San Francisco, the school board voted unanimously to have the city’s students take Friday, March 9th, off to go to Berkeley, in order to stage a protest demonstration,...
After every tragic school shooting — and many other shocking murders — the question gets asked: “How could he do such a thing?” This has become the centerpiece of a whole set of rituals. Another part of these rituals is the appearance of...
The death of a distinguished scientist or a leading novelist usually attracts public attention. But the recent death of perhaps the most celebrated figure in academic philosophy–Harvard’s Willard Van Orman Quine–attracted virtually none. This lack of...
Say you’re accused of a sexual offense and you’re forbidden to confront your accuser, have an attorney present or cross-examine witnesses. Where are you? A) IraqB) IranC) CubaD) Columbia University If your final answer was “D,” you’re...
YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD of the University of Phoenix, but it has more students than Harvard, Yale or Notre Dame —- combined. There is a reason you probably have not heard of the University of Phoenix. It represents a new development in higher education and one...
By John Chamberlain Stalin’s Apologist is an apt title for S. J. Taylor’s absorbing story of Walter Duranty (Oxford University Press, 404 pages, $24.95 cloth), But whether Taylor’s subtitle of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow holds up in all its...
Santa Claus is also a symbol of good will, and thus is the appropriate holiday symbol of America, a country that, because of its material prosperity, can inspire good will in all of its citizens.”
What’s the fundamental difference between being a whim worshiper and being spontaneous? A whim worshipper acts on whatever urges move him, at the moment they first move him. He does not stop and use reason to evaluate what he’s doing. A spontaneous person...
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