With all of the other, more immediate concerns so many Americans are struggling with now, I fear that the kinds of questions Ravitch is raising in this piece will be greeted, if they are noticed, with a collective shrug of the shoulders.  I think Ravitch and others who share these concerns somehow need to find a voice that speaks to and connects with parents, not just intellectuals and some policymakers.  I think the questions she is raising are very important.  But pieces such as this one do not resonate with me primarily in my role as a parent.  And that's a problem for anyone who feels as she does and would like to see more attention paid in public commentary to them.   

Sometimes it feels to me as though our society has all but lost--or is it just temporarily forgotten?--its ability to really grasp what is important and vital about key parts of what is public.  To the degree this is true I think the Randians have had an enormous influence on the current zeitgeist, far out of proportion to their numbers.  Their ideas never would have resonated and penetrated into the deepest crevices of our society in the way they seem to have if we did not already have--long prior to their arrival on the scene--a strong cultural inclination towards an atomized concept of the individual which is quite radical in terms of being out of sync with much of what we know about human behavior, and looks to be an outlier on the planet.  Rand's ideas might be seen as just the reductio ad absurdum of it.  Leading, predictably, to much disfunctionality in the social/political responses to today's challenges.