Study Help Practice Projects

1. Stage a meeting between John Galt and the President of the United States. What would Galt say to him? How would the President respond? Create and enact a dialogue between the two. Perform the same activity with John Galt (or one of the novel’s other main characters) and a different world leader.

2. Design a Web site to introduce Atlas Shrugged to other readers. What will you say to interest them in the book’s story and ideas? Invite readers to post their thoughts regarding the novel.

3. Stage the following debates:

a. A debate with Galt and the strikers on one side and Dagny and the scabs on the other, regarding the best way to defend the freedom of the mind in a country that’s moving toward dictatorship.

b. A debate between advocates of socialism and admirers of capitalism regarding the most moral and practical political/economic system.

4. Discuss — don’t debate — what human society would be like if Galt’s philosophy was dominant. What if the beliefs of Hank Rearden, as portrayed early in the story, were dominant? What if the looters’ ideas were dominant? Whose ideas, if any from among the book’s characters, are most influential in the world today? What are the practical consequences of these ideas?

5. Hold a simulated Constitutional Convention in which you revise some parts of the United States Constitution (as Judge Narragansett does near the end of the book) in accordance with the principles of John Galt.

6. Write a newspaper editorial defending Galt’s principle of individual rights in opposition to the government’s latest violation of those rights.