Saturday, October 09, 2004

Who is John Galt?

Thanks to "Educators' Weekend" at Borders, I now own a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I've never read any of her stuff, though I know we studied her a smidgen in college. Most of my reading material of late has either been written from my own worldview, or (like Ovid's Metamorphoses) reading for school. I'm curious to see how well I will be able to recognize others' worldviews as different from my own. It's one of the things we work to teach our students, but I'm not sure how well I can do it myself. It's not a new concept for me, just a new practice. I recently read Reading with Purpose by Nancy Wilson and have been challenged to change the way I think about the material I'm reading. How could I have gotten this far in life, graduated with a degree in literature, and not learned to discern from what I am reading the philosophy and worldview of the author? I never knew I would learn so much more than Latin by becoming a Latin teacher.

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