You are here: Home » Dave Brockington » This Week in Republican Crazy, Idaho Edition
Idaho State Senator John Goedde, chair of the Education Committee, introduced a bill requiring all high school students read, and pass a test on, Atlas Shrugged as a requirement for graduation.
Sadly, it seems that he’s just joking.
h/t John Neuharth
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Las Vegas Personal Injury Attorney
Sarasota Law Firms
Need Cash? Sky Loans can
help you! quick and easy money loans.
Bridging Loans
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
For administrative, advertising, or other inquiries, please e-mail here.
Why would a HS require online courses to graduate?
Wait – I’m going to hazard a guess – in some manner the people who sell these online courses to Idaho fund this Senators campaign.
What do you do if you don’t have internet access at home and don’t have reliable transportation to a library whenever you need?
Unless you allow kids to do the online courses at school (during class time), which would seem pretty dumb since you could just have the teacher teach.
Making Atlas Shrugged required reading? Wouldn’t refusing to read it be the Randian thing to do?
Reading Atlas Shrugged made me a Republican
I was 17 at the time.
Then Richard Nixon happened, and slowly the scales fell from my eyes. Reagan. Clinton impeachment. Bush II. McShame. The Romneybot.
Now I wouldn’t vote for a Rethug at any level of government.
They are just that loathsome.
I read Atlas Shrugged at 20 and it alternately bored, amused and nauseated me. Mostly bored.
That was my reaction when I read it at 14.
thank goodness, i was beginning to think i was the only one who made this mistake.
“That was my reaction when I read it at 14.”
in my defense, i was very into sci-fi at the time (bradbury, heinlein, etc), and thought that’s what it was. it was the most god awful piece of dreck ever to cheapen the stacks in a library. it gave new meaning to turgid, and less to prose. i forced myself to finish it, because i felt like, once i started a book, i should finish it. masochism deserves no prize.
I’ve taught law students in Idaho.
I don’t know if enough of them could actually read Atlas Shrugged.
Forcing students to read that awful dreck, might actually have the opposite reaction that this moron might want.
Nothing will turn young students off more than having to read massive some book with an 80+ page self-aggrandizing monologue by some rich @$$hole, extolling about how his selfishness and greed were actually virtues.
Ayn Rand makes sense only to people who have the maturity level of a 3 year-old with emotional problems, and the ability to withstand a huge volume full of insipid writing, violent sex, and brutal and selfish cartoon characters.
“Herp, derp!” said Idaho State Senator John Goedde, angrily, waving his tiny pistol. “Derp dee hur’” he then said to relieved laughter, easing the tension in the room and giving assurances that this toddler with a loaded weapon wasn’t going to totally fvcking freak out on the state education system over his unresolved daddy issues.
+1
I love this quote.
It might be interesting to actually have a critical reading of it, but that book is just too damn long and boring.
Wouldn’t that be unconstitutional on 8th amendment grounds?
I think it is under the 1st Amendment (freedom of religion), as well.
If this is true then the high school teacher who assigned me Brighton Rock has some explaining to do.
How vapid and empty was this fellow’s upbringing, that he needed fantasy fiction to acquire personal responsibility?
Personal responsibility for inspecting the safety of a restaurant before you dine there, personal responsbility for making sure the banker doesn’t run out the back door with the money you just deposited, personal responsibility for blowing back the toxic cloud drifting in from your neighbor’s meth lab…Utopia!
“Joking”? Ah yes. My favorite backpedal though is the “satire” defense. These people are so cute.
if they actually could identify satire, they might even fool one or two people. sadly, no.
But aside from all the preaching, it is full of extra-marital sex. And Dabney is not a cookie-baking, child-rearing, decent woman.
Maybe that’s why he decided it would have to be just a joke.
Since apparently this is the Internet site for proposing new Internet Traditions, I think devising the test would be an excellent exercise. There are a number of alternative formats:
1) True False
2) Multiple choice
3) Fill in the blank
4) No Multiple choice
5) Essay
or since it would be online
6) First Person Shooter
My first suggested question would be
Dagney Taggart is:
a) An ethical actor by Objectivist standards
b) Hot
c) A role model for red blooded American adolescent males of all ages.
d) Nothing like the bitches we have to deal with in real life
e) All of the above