Brave New Education?

I believe the main point of Ken Robinson’s video is to show how the education standards today are simply creating “drones” of students. In the video Robinson mentions the use of ADHD medications, which are amphetamines that act to make one unaware of their senses. I believe this connects very well with the soma medication taken in Brave New World used to “make lives emotionally easy.” Robinson claims that children today are so overly stimulated, that they need to be calmed to be able to learn at school. But to do this with pharmaceutical medications is simply killing of any creativity or individuality one is born with. I really enjoyed the longitudinal study Robinson mentioned, where when children’s creativity is tested at a young age, 98 percent are deemed geniuses. I believe the current school system’s main priority is churning out similar students to better aid society, such as in Brave New World where Ford’s assembly line technology is deemed their deity, the reason behind their so called perfect society. I believe the current system of education is not far off from “hypnopaedia” as mentioned in Brave New World. In the current system, Ken Robinson explains how creativity is killed in order to mass produce students that are all similar to each other. How students are broken up into groups by age and not by skill set or level of comprehension. Ken Robinson attacks the current system for creating a “false epidemic” of ADHD that has not been scientifically proven to be a real condition. Ken Robinson believes that the over stimulating world we live in today has caused students to not be able to focus in school, and therefore believe that they are “dumb,” when in fact they can be extremely gifted in other areas, talents that they may never discover due to the current system of education

Brave New World Order

In Brave New World, we are shown what it takes to run a so called “perfect” society. According to the book, in order to have a stable civilization, you need social classes. Even though in theory it seems reasonable to have the less able individuals doing the less demanding jobs, Aldous Huxley demonstrates the need to manipulate people’s lives to create this ideal utopian world. Huxley shows this through Mond’s description of social equality, “Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.” This quote explains how democracy is based on the fact that all men are created equal, however there is a need for different jobs and leadership. Who gets stuck doing the lower class jobs if all men are supposedly equal? The explanation comes from the book, which goes to show how cruel a society must really be in order to be perfectly stable. Huxley demonstrates how people would need to be physically handicapped before birth in order to keep them interested in their lower class jobs. He shows how conditioning the population can lead to a society focused on consumption, with a thriving economy. Huxley shows how the negatives of a utopian society greatly outweigh the positives of one.  If everything up to human reproduction and DNA needs to be messed with in order to provide society with the type of people it needs, why bother? War and other crisis may be abolished under their “New World,” but at what cost? Mond describes the symbolic wheels as needing to be turned, which is exactly what a society needs. However, Huxley shows the absurdity of truly attempting to create a utopia through his description of the completely artificial future, the focus on Ford’s assembly line technology, and the loss of individuality.  

Preparing to Write about The Tempest

In discussions of the analyzing of literary works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one controversial issue has been the path a reader takes in deciphering the original intended meaning of the author. On the one hand, some people like George Will argue that literary works should only be analyzed explicitly from the text, and no inferring should be done. He also believes that political issues should be kept out of literary analysis as to not “corrupt” the works in a sense. On the other hand, Stephen Greenblatt contends that one must look between the lines for hidden gems to analyze in works such as Shakespeare’s. This view matches up with Aime Cesaire’s view from his work, A Tempest, which attempts to portray the supposed true meaning of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a very brute and satirical fashion. Others even maintain that all analysis is worthwhile as long as their views relate to other critics’ and they are critical, state a strong held position, and in the end contribute to the overall discussion meaningfully. After seeing all these different ways to approach analyzing literature, I believe I hold firm on my perspective that literature is for one to analyze for them self. As humans we tend to interject our own beliefs into everything we encounter. I believe you can give 100 different people a complex work like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and each and every one of them will have their own unique perspective on it. They will conjure up an analysis that relates to something they have experienced in their life, and even though it is intrapersonal analysis, it will not necessarily be wrong. As a student used to the fact that past English teachers have shoved “accepted” meanings and analysis down our throats, having the freedom to analyze literature from my point of view is a breath of fresh air.