I saw this survey somewhere, forget eggzackly, (update: was over at emdot's) and decided to take a swing at it, just to see where I fell amongst the various schools of philosophical thought.

Amazingly enough, I don't know all that much about Rand. Read The Fountainhead as a teen, and liked it well enough to include it in my list of all-time favorites, but that's it.

On the other hand, was not at all surprised to see Plato near the bottom of the list, and Augustine at the very bottom.

I bitch about those two all the damn time.

Plato invented the concept of the things of the spritual realm as being somehow more Good than those of the physical world, and Augustine shoehorned that shit into Xianity, with all the sorry consequences that has had on Western thought.

You wanna know why we get our brains bound with the idea that we're inherently evil, that life here on earth is somehow inferior compared to what some imagine comes after, that Sex is Bad, or why a philosopher is held in a higher status than, say, a good auto mechanic, here are the two men you can blame.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - gimme a time machine and a sniper rifle, and Augustine is toast.

My results:

1. Ayn Rand (100%)
2. John Stuart Mill (82%)
3. Jean-Paul Sartre (70%)
4. Aristotle (67%)
5. Thomas Hobbes (65%)
6. Epicureans (62%)
7. Kant (59%)
8. Jeremy Bentham (58%)
9. Cynics (52%)
10. David Hume (51%)
11. Prescriptivism (48%)
12. Nietzsche (45%)
13. Aquinas (45%)
14. Stoics (41%)
15. Plato (36%)
16. Ockham (34%)
17. Spinoza (34%)
18. Nel Noddings (25%)
19. St. Augustine (23%)

Try it yourself.

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Anybody that is homeschooling their kids, or is maybe thinking about it, or has kids in school, or pays tuition or taxes for schools, or wants to be able to discuss things like vouchers, or the overall decline in the school system, and halfway know what they're talking about, needs to go read this most eggsellent essay.

I think that means most of us.

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I suppose that given their demonstrated lack of ability to influence anything that actually matters in relation to local education, public school administrators decide to, instead, focus their efforts on meaningless dress codes.

Same as it ever was.

As a kid going to high school in the early to mid 70's, the war between the students and the Powers That Be centered on a few meaningless measures - to wit: the length of one's hair, and the clothes one wore. I was required to wear a coat and tie all through high school, and keep my hair short.

We obeyed the first law by making a mockery of it - we wore our forest green coats with purple shirts and green and yellow paisley ties, knotted so that the knot looked like a malignant goiter dangling under our chins, with the dangly part of the tie barely reaching to the third button of our dress shirts, the collars of which were invariably rumpled and turned up

We teased, sprayed, and poofed our hair into giant protein helmets to keep it off our collars, as the reg said that those collars, and our ears, need be untouched by human hair - the lazier among us tied it into ponytails, stuffed the tails down the back of those unkempt collars, and then plotted our routes between classes to avoid the Prefect of Discipline (which was what we called the Enforcer known in most public schools as the Asst. Principal)

Oh yeah, we also published an underground newspaper, run off on the school mimeograph machines while the Man wasn't looking, known as "The Ax." The subtitle under the banner on the front page was "Give 'Em the Ax." Among it's pseudononymously authored content, decorating muckraking paragraphs comparing the administrators to Fascist Dictators, Hitler, or even worse, to Nixon, would be a few cartoons showing the student body's current foes (said Prefect of Discipline, strict teachers, etc.) in a graphic depiction of being beheaded, with the masked executioner being labeled the Student Body, and the stump upon which their heads had lately been rested, before flying off trailing tails of blood, as "Destiny," or some other suitable symbol, I actually forget which, after all these years.

In short, it was rabble-rousing demagogic propaganda of the most amateurish implementation imaginable.

Here's the punch line - the year I graduated from this all-male, Jesuit school, my class of 120-odd classmates had twelve of us as National Merit Scholars, more than any of the much larger public schools in the city, and on a pro-rata basis, among the best in the nation.

Seems as if for all of our dissent, we still managed to learn something.

The school is still in business today, with, if anything, an even stronger record and reputation, though all the dress restrictions that the school fought to uphold in those days are dead.

Stupidity has a long half-life, though, and still lives on in schools across the nation.

Evidenced by this.

A local Houston school, in fact, the one which I would have attended had I not gone to that Jesuit school, has suspended an 18 year-old student for having dyed her hair a bit too red for their taste.

(Sigh)

The school's rationale?

"The student handbook states a student's appearance cannot be a distraction in class. "

Heavens to Mergatroid, then, if you wanna ban the distractions...

Segregate the sexes - the churning pots of raging hormones that are teenage brains spend more time distracted by the opposite sex than they ever have or will do about their studies.

This was true decades before high school girls started coloring their hair, or high school boys started growing theirs - seems as though a few generations of American kids were able to learn something despite it.

True Fact: A pretty girl with big knockers bouncing around in her skimpy cheerleader's uniform at the pep rally is gonna distract waaaaay more boys from Shakespeare and calculus than some skrawnky goth chick with purple and green hair, in a black jacket festooned with more chains than Marley's ghost, and safety pins through her nose, a-clanking around at the local peace rally.

Hey, you wanna ban distractions from learning, fine. But do it right.

Start with the Pretty People.

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