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What irks Stadler is the book on his desk, Why Do You Think You Think?. It demeans logic and rational thought, questions the very nature of reality, is written by Dr. Floyd Ferris, Top Coordinator of the State Science Institute, and is published under the Institute’s aegis.

Our education system is headed down this road. Secondary schools are there, but colleges will have to succomb soon (if they haven't already) because of the dumbed-down students they are handed. The liberal arts majors might be more dumbed down now than in the past and I know technical majors now require more liberal arts electives than they did when got an engineering degree, but I hope the technical classes' requirements haven't changed. I think those will be the last to go.

Ferris says that people don’t want to think and that they will bless anyone who takes the obligation of thinking away from them;

Again, dumbed down elementary and secondary schools have made this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Who is John Galt?” Stadler doesn’t like the expression but says he once knew a John Galt, now deceased. Had he lived, the whole world would have talked of him. Dagny points out that the whole world is talking of him. Stadler reacts in terror: “He has to be dead.”

Why the terror? This isn't the first character in the book to be afraid when John Galt is mentioned, I believe.

He and Dagny are the intended victims, and the looters seek the sanction of the victim, forcing him to face the world from the looters’ perspective.

This is like the winpy RINOs in Congress accepting the Dem's premises as correct and then trying to fight them based on that false premise. Funny that it hasn't worked. /s We need to only look at our own perspective and stand firm.

Our education system is headed down this road.

We began heading down this road in the Seventies, and even then, college students at many schools had to take a course called "freshman bonehead English" to be ready for first year studies. That trend has only expanded over the past 35 years.

Why the terror?

I don't want to post a spoiler. Dr. Stadler has every reason to fear that John Galt is alive and well.

Our education system is headed down this road. Secondary schools are there, but colleges will have to succomb soon (if they haven't already) because of the dumbed-down students they are handed. The liberal arts majors might be more dumbed down now than in the past and I know technical majors now require more liberal arts electives than they did when got an engineering degree

My experience is that you are wrong. I went to an engineering school (RPI) back in the 60s because I had no patience for anything that couldn't be expressed in a formula like F=Ma. Now I'm different and I think that taking a year of Atomic and Nuclear Physics was probably the most useless thing I ever did. I go back to the schools my kids attended and participate in "liberal arts" classes. To be sure I rarely, if ever, take a class in something that includes the word studies in its course title; and my kids did go to prestigious schools. My experience has been that the kids in those classes I've participated in are extremely bright, articulate, thoughtful. What other adjectives should I use. It is a dangerous myth that these kids are all mind numbed robots. That may be the way it is these days at CCNY, but it isn't that way at the schools the kids in the top ten of their HS graduating classes attend if they attended any sort of competitive HS.

ML/NJ

Who is John Galt?” Stadler doesn’t like the expression but says he once knew a John Galt, now deceased. Had he lived, the whole world would have talked of him. Dagny points out that the whole world is talking of him. Stadler reacts in terror: “He has to be dead.” Why the terror? This isn't the first character in the book to be afraid when John Galt is mentioned, I believe.

I thought about that awhile myself. My assumption at this point is like how Bromden thinks about McMurphy is Cuckoo's Nest, that it's better for him to be dead rather than enduring the current state of affairs. IOW, "How terrible if John Galt were to be living in a world like today's!"