'Art In Education' by Ayn Rand

In this lecture on ethics in education, Ayn Rand describes the role of Romantic art in a young person’s development of normative concepts and a “moral sense of life,” as well as the moral and psychological consequences of the disappearance of Romantic art from modern Western culture.

Rand touches upon such subjects as:

• The source of the false dichotomy of “the practical versus the moral”
• How conventional morality has placed the field of ethics itself in a bad light
• The process by which an idealistic child can come to fear and repress his emotions
• The harm done by modern philosophy, education and culture to men’s moral development

An article based on this lecture was published in The Objectivist Newsletter in March 1965 under the title “Art and Moral Treason” and was later anthologized in The Romantic Manifesto (1971).

SUBSCRIBE TO NEW IDEAL, ARI'S ONLINE PUBLICATION

SUBSCRIBE TO ARI’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL

SUPPORT THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE WITH A DONATION

EXPLORE ARI

FOLLOW ARI ON TWITTER

LIKE ARI ON FACEBOOK

[clairerobsin]

@ 38:39 ...if you can find the Time, read Victor Hugo's 'The Man Who Laughs' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' for example

[geneherald]

This speech is more pertinent now than 60 years ago

[Siagos]

"There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness.

These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches a glimpse of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. They do not seem to be men but forms composed of living mists; one would say that they habitually constitute one mass with the shadows, that they are in no wise distinct from them, that they possess no other soul than the darkness, and that it is only momentarily and for the purpose of living for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they have separated from the night.

What is necessary to cause these specters to vanish? Light. Light in floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from below." Victor Hugo <3