The Psychology and Philosophy of Education in Ayn Rand's The Comprachicos
I. The Psychology and Philosophy of Education of Ayn Rand as presented in
‘The Comprachicos’
Ayn Rand writes mainly about the status quo and what and who is to be blamed for such circumstances. She talks of a miseducation so ingenious that when one reads about it one simply gets baffled as he is forced to look into his own experiences from the home, to the school, to the Church and in the province or in the city. One can expect to see various parallelisms with how he is brought up and what he is usually told by his superiors. The reason for these apparent similarities, I think is that aside from the ‘system’ that almost each person is forced into; there is something common in every one of us. This is what makes us man, Rand says, our capability to be rational. Rand believes that man is rational and that this characteristic is, by itself unyielding. It is a capacity that can be impaired and can be prevented to work at its best, as what the comprachicos do but it survives even in those who are the ‘exact concretization’ of the Nursery School ideal, the hippies. Rationality is that which enables any man to; even with the worst education given to him feel that something is wrong because things appear blurred to him, that things must have clarity for it to appear blurred in the first place. It gives him an inkling perhaps or an intuition that something is not right around him and yet he still feels that ‘he has to make something somehow’. This is because of his rationality which naturally is the opposite of the fake, the submission, the uncertainty and the chaos. Man is rational because he has a mind. For Rand, this mind is empty at birth as what John Locke holds to be Tabula Rasa. It does not have innate contents; it is on the other hand waiting to be written upon by the experiences to come. Rand says that it has the potential for awareness, with a conscious and a subconscious mind that he must learn to operate to be able to construct
‘The Comprachicos’
Ayn Rand writes mainly about the status quo and what and who is to be blamed for such circumstances. She talks of a miseducation so ingenious that when one reads about it one simply gets baffled as he is forced to look into his own experiences from the home, to the school, to the Church and in the province or in the city. One can expect to see various parallelisms with how he is brought up and what he is usually told by his superiors. The reason for these apparent similarities, I think is that aside from the ‘system’ that almost each person is forced into; there is something common in every one of us. This is what makes us man, Rand says, our capability to be rational. Rand believes that man is rational and that this characteristic is, by itself unyielding. It is a capacity that can be impaired and can be prevented to work at its best, as what the comprachicos do but it survives even in those who are the ‘exact concretization’ of the Nursery School ideal, the hippies. Rationality is that which enables any man to; even with the worst education given to him feel that something is wrong because things appear blurred to him, that things must have clarity for it to appear blurred in the first place. It gives him an inkling perhaps or an intuition that something is not right around him and yet he still feels that ‘he has to make something somehow’. This is because of his rationality which naturally is the opposite of the fake, the submission, the uncertainty and the chaos. Man is rational because he has a mind. For Rand, this mind is empty at birth as what John Locke holds to be Tabula Rasa. It does not have innate contents; it is on the other hand waiting to be written upon by the experiences to come. Rand says that it has the potential for awareness, with a conscious and a subconscious mind that he must learn to operate to be able to construct