Ayn Rand and Leonard Read, the founder of FEE, communicated with each other in the mid 1940s, as Read was launching FEE. Rand was constructively critical of the venture, writing Read a seven-page letter including this:
The organization desperately needed at present is one for education in individualism, in every aspect of it: philosophical, moral, political, economic—in that order. (That is the actual order in which men’s thinking proceeds on these subjects.) As part of such a program, an education in sound economics would be essential and valuable. Without it, it is a wasted effort.
Decades later, FEE is now engaging with Rand’s philosophical, moral, and political ideas—and teaching them to FEE participants.
In September, Prometheus Foundation awarded FEE a grant for a pilot program (with the possibility of a much larger grant and program in the future). This pilot program involved four elements:
- Running a series of webinars presenting Rand’s ideas to students in the National Society for High School Scholars program;
- Providing Henry Hazlitt fellowships for three young Objectivist writers—Jon Hersey, Angelica Walker-Werth, and Thomas Walker-Werth—to write articles for FEE about freedom and economics from an Objectivist perspective;
- Presenting Rand’s ideas on the morality of capitalism and the heroic nature of entrepreneurship to high school students during FEE’s E-Week (“E” for “Entrepreneur”); and
- Integrating principles of Objectivism into FEE’s Learning Center, which is used by members of FEE’s high school teacher network of more than 8,000 educators.
The program is going beautifully. As an indication, 719 students attended a series of webinars on “Loving Life and Choosing Virtue,” held in June and July, and taught by Eric Daniels, Anne Rathbone Bradley, and Craig Biddle. Jon Hersey has published twelve articles at FEE, which have had more than 44,000 page views. (Angelica’s and Thomas’s fellowships began in January 2022.) A cohort of 213 high school students participated in the four-day E-Week program. And Andrew Bernstein is currently working with FEE on a program for FEE’s online learning center, titled “Markets and Morality,” involving texts, videos, exercises, and quizzes.
