We do agree, though from different perspectives, and that brings a difference in point of view. As you say: "Just because they didn't have their noses in books when Dagny toured the gulch doesn't mean they weren't getting the best education possible."

First, let me assume that "they" refers to the boys in the book, not the girls in the movie. I do not believe that "having their noses in a book" was Ayn Rand's ides of education for children, though it might well have been how she lived as a child. Her heroes experienced the world through action. Dagny and Francisco climbed through junkyards and scrapheaps. When Dagny met the boys, they were running around. The economist-lineman's wife said that she would not surrender her children to schools (plural) that taught that "reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal..." The boys were not in school at all.

Second,let us consider the girls. They were sitting down, amusing themselves quietly, while Mom worked the fruit stand. Mom said that she homeschooled them. Given that there are about one to two million homeschooled kids in the USA right now (see for instance http://www.nheri.org/research/research-f... and also http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013028.pdf) there are probably about a million ways to do that. My observation is that it is just another way to get your kids to sit down, shut up, and do as they are told. Mom has more control over the kids when she teaches them at home. No one "homeschools" their kids by turning them loose in scrapyards -- not even me.

I took my daughter to scrapyards, junkheaps, museums. On the Michigan State University campus, we tried every door and went in wherever the doors opened: the engineering building and the planetarium, of course, but also, the greenhouses and the sheep pens. Selene got to chat with an animal husbandry student about the critters in her care. She would never have gotten that from me; I'm a city boy.

We visited our daughter in Miami Beach over Labor Day. She confessed that she often cut loose on her bike; and at eight and ten was in neighborhoods a mile or more away from home. My wife was appalled. I was happy for the kid.

After reading THE GIRL WHO OWNED A CITY, I taught Selene to drive at 11. When she took the car for a joy ride at 14 and was picked up by the police, my wife was silent all the way to the cop shop. Before we got out of the car, Laurel said, "You and your libertarian ideas..."