school is reverse psychology at its best:

[assasin7]

1. Kids are forced into school, and told they must become smart, they resent being forced into school.

2. They see being stupid as a form of resistance, so it is valued. Intelligence is sign of submission, or worse betrayal to the powers that be.

3. Kids leave school stupid, without realizing that was what their masters wanted all along

[dpalme]

It's kind of funny that the people I know that are like that are some of the smartest folks I know.

[assasin7]

It's kind of funny that the people I know that are like that are some of the smartest folks I know.

I know, see I'm a dirty commie your a selfish randroid, but we can agree on stuff.

[dpalme]

haha, I wouldn't even consider myself a "Randroid." Tried reading Atlas Shrugged and couldn't get past part 1. Just thought it was boring (that's right, I said it!).

[Hanzo]

haha, I wouldn't even consider myself a "Randroid." Tried reading Atlas Shrugged and couldn't get past part 1. Just thought it was boring (that's right, I said it!).

I like some aspects of her philosophy, and admire her because the elitist internet lefties hate her, but she was really an awful writer. The Fountainhead had a great message (more about living for yourself than politics), but the sentence structure, characters, and all that jazz were just bad.

[Euler]

Kids are never told to be smart in school. They're told to memorize a bunch of facts or mechanical processes and reproduce them on tests which have been reduced to accounting for 50% of a student's grade in favor of measures of a student's ability to come and sit in a chair or raise their hand once a class to ask a trivial question.

I was the only professor I knew of at my institution (saying 'knew of' not saying that existed) who made it an express goal of the class to produce intelligent people rather than people who could memorize some trigonometric identities.

[macsnafu]

haha, I wouldn't even consider myself a "Randroid." Tried reading Atlas Shrugged and couldn't get past part 1. Just thought it was boring (that's right, I said it!).

I like some aspects of her philosophy, and admire her because the elitist internet lefties hate her, but she was really an awful writer. The Fountainhead had a great message (more about living for yourself than politics), but the sentence structure, characters, and all that jazz were just bad.

Hmm...I must have been too busy focusing on the plot to notice the bad writing!  ;-)

And while I've had a few books that I gave up on, Atlas Shrugged wasn't one of them.

But really, while I rather enjoyed the books, I found it hard to get the full idea behind the philosophy of objectivism from the fiction, just some key points here and there. It's much better to read her non-fiction essays for a decent understanding of Objectivism.

[Euler]

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal was a major book in my conversion to minarchism before going full fledged ancap. Her prose is weak, but that doesn't sink a book by itself. Her fiction is good enough.

[macsnafu]

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal was a major book in my conversion to minarchism before going full fledged ancap. Her prose is weak, but that doesn't sink a book by itself. Her fiction is good enough.

For me, it was For the New Intellectual that opened my eyes and made me a libertarian.
Of course, it made me a libertarian, not an Objectivist!

[BobRobertson]

Public school did it for me. I realized that nothing beneficial could possibly be this awful. The evils of bureaucracy were evident all around, and it became obvious that the only reason for the continued existence of the overwhelming failure was because it was a government program.

It didn't take long to realize that all government programs are exactly the same. Failures. Courts and police were last, as they are usually first in the "OHMYGODWHATWOULDWEDOWITHOUT...."

[MAM]

I hated High School, my teachers hated me too because I refused to take their silly standardized tests. Also on the days I bothered to go to the assemblies I brought screw drivers for myself and my fellow heads.

I mean it was sheer boredom and worse I was bullied, that's time in my life I can't get back...

I still passed though because the standards were so pathetic that I didn't even have to attend class to know the answers... Terrible...