Brave New World banned from High School curriculum
blogs.seattleweekly.com
blogs.seattleweekly.com
This sort of episode should serve to remind us that passion and prejudice are ever at-the-ready to spring up and override reason.
On the side of reason:
1. You have a classic work of literature that is widely recognized as an important indictment of totalitarian societies, something that young people in a free society should presumably regard as a staple of their learning.
2. You have a significant historical work that is a product of its times, which sound learning should suggest ought to be taken on its own terms, notwithstanding that society has changed since then in what it regards as acceptable cultural references. Again, even if regressive, one would think those raised in a free society would encourage its study, if nothing else than to understand why the older cultural references existed and why people accepted and later rejected them (if that is indeed what happened).
3. You have reasonable arguments that the references to "savages," taken in context, were not intended to be demeaning at all but were essentially a literary device used to promote the themes of the work. Again, in a free society, one would think these would be topics that ought to be debated as part of coming to grips with a classic work.
On the side of passion and prejudice:
1. You have public school systems that are charged with developing strong young minds and yet willingly succumb to the premise that some forms of expression ought to be censored or circumscribed at the whims of pressure groups in the community.
2. You have serious subjects being resolved by supposedly responsible public officials at the level of pure emotion.
3. You have what amounts to open demagoguery holding sway over that which scholars would widely if not unanimously oppose.
The stunning thing here is how one-sided this all was, with cravenly officials scarcely even putting up resistance. The next thing you know, they will be banning books that use the word "niggardly." Based on the logic on display here, that is surely next in line.
I think the problem, as is often the case, comes down to incentives. School officials have few incentives to make decisions on the side of reason, which may be difficult or unpopular, and many incentives to make "popular" decisions, which tend to err on the side of passion and prejudice. Exploring why that is the case is a true rabbit hole...
That's not bad. Could be a whole lot worse.
At least I have the convenient excuse I live in Brazil. ;-)
The references to savages are a timeless indictment of imperial powers like those referenced in the book. The woman in question clearly has not read it, as it is really on her side.
Worth pointing out, because when I saw this word while reading Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf recently I did a double-take, that niggardly has absolutely nothing to do with "niggers".
Niggardly means "miserly" or "stingy". It is based on "niggard", not "nigger", which means the same - a miser, a stingy person. The roots of this word are:
Derived from the Old Norse verb nigla, meaning "to fuss about small matters". Cognate to the English word "niggle", which retains the original Norse meaning.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niggard has further information:
This word, along with its adverbial form niggardly, should be used with caution. Owing to the sound similarity to the highly inflammatory racial epithet nigger, these words can cause unnecessary confusion and unintentional offense. The word is not related to the word nigger (a corruption of the Spanish word negro, meaning "black"), though someone unfamiliar with the word niggardly might take offense due to the phonetic similarity between the words.
Talk about an unhelpful coincidence. I wonder how many words fall out of disuse not because of their meaning but because of their phonetic similarity to words considered offensive.
But I guess you get around that impasse by just pronouncing it wrong. (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant])
Homonyms are also overtaken by many an overbearing counterpart or outright co-option as slang (i.e. queer, gay, faggot, et al) Language is a fascinating thing to me. It's dynamism is rooted in it's ties to self expression and may only be second to the web itself.
Interestingly one German translation is set in Berlin, and uses the names of German capitalists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%2...
Indeed. The “savage” reads Shakespeare, which no one else in the book does anymore, for example.
It’s just like people wanting to ban Huck Finn because it uses the word “nigger,” without realizing the friendship between Huck and Jim shows just how silly racism actually is, or how the novel basically satirizes slave ownership by making Huck explicitly contemplate the “immorality” of helping a slave escape.
Now, is Huck Finn that important as a piece of literature? Arguably. However what definitely was important was that all his students learned a good lesson about censorship and having a proper disrespect for authority when needed.
Here almost everyone knows this woman is crazy they just don't want to confront her on it. So the civil disobedience you suggest would draw attention to the wrong problem (censorship) and leave the right problem (crazy people getting their way) untouched.
Sometimes you have to pretend to throw your principles away until the next shiny object comes along.
'and then everyone reads it anyway' And when the time comes some simpleton that just takes orders and follows the law to the letter will come and throw you into prison for reading it.
Are you serious?
Person A: "I hate foo."
Person B: "Oh, yeah, me too, it's banned."
Person A: "Great!"
Person B: "NOT!"
but person A is already bored with the issue, so everyone is happy.
The problem is that it is easier to jump to a conclusion than it is to stop and think.
The problem is that it is easier to jump to a conclusion
than it is to stop and think.
I think the problem is that our society gives in to stupid people if they scream loud enough. There always has been and always will be fools in the world. People who don't think, don't read and jump to anger as their first reaction.
The difference here is the fool got her way because a school board full of people not wanting to cause trouble backed down rather than confront her.
One of the cornerstones of democracy is that the ignorant will chose who also governs the educated if they are numerous enough.
Sadly true...
Of course, there's a subtle distinction between treating all people the same, and giving in to 'fools', that is left as an exercise to the prospective citizen.
I've read Huck Finn (and Tom Sawyer) as required in high school. I am also black. As a product of it's day, I understand the context in which the language is being used but that didn't make it any less demeaning and frankly the only effect it had on me was to make me not want to read any more Mark Twain works. Requiring me to read these works and expecting me to appreciate its message is a lot like saying you should admire the boxing skills of the mugger who's beating you up.
I am perfectly fine with allowing students to study these works on their own or to write reports on them, but I don't think students should be required to read them.
It's my belief that no one has the right not to be offended and I would rather live in a society of people that are brought up to be exposed to realities of our history and culture that offend them.
I say let kids think for themselves and sometimes be offended. Expose them to religious writings; it's part of who we are (no, I'm not religious). Let them read the writings of dictators to get inside the heads of men that did terrible things to better understand history. etc.
What would we have to lose other than to have a society of people that better understand the world and the history that brought us here?
I totally agree - let them think for themselves and let them read and research what they want. Forcing them to do so on the other hand helps no one.
YMMV. Like I wrote, my exposure to Mark Twain just resulted in me not going anywhere near his other works.
What would we have to lose other than to have a society of people that better understand the world and the history that brought us here?
Life experience was a much better instructor to me than nigger Jim.
I have to disagree here. Certainly, you can make the "at least they're reading something!"-type of argument. That is, when you let them read Twilight or something of similarly less literary value than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, well, "at least they're reading something!" I think this is doing a disservice to "the kids", though.
I mean, it's a tough argument. It sucks that we can't just make kids be seriously interested in literature, science, and mathematics. It's quite possibly (probably?) an indictment of our teachers that 95% (totally made up statistic) of kids who read Huck Finn just don't get it. I mean, I know I didn't when I was 14 and had to read it.
"As a product of it's day, I understand the context in which the language is being used but that didn't make it any less demeaning..."
I can't imagine what it was like to be a black kid being forced to read Huck Finn in school. I'm sure most teachers have some cursory 5-minute CYA lecture about how Twain was using vernacular to best illustrate his point about what things really were like in America in the 19th century, but I imagine as a black kid the language was still shocking. As a white kid the language is shocking, but obviously not in the same way. Re: your "as a product of it's day" comment, though, you're completely missing the point! "Nigger" wasn't used extensively in Huck Finn because Twain thought it was the best descriptor or what his readers would be most familiar with, he used it because he was decrying the mindset that makes that word acceptable altogether! Probably the biggest point made in the book was that even Huckleberry Finn, a poor, uneducated, half-illiterate southerner could realize that Jim is no less a human being than he or anyone else, and that his entire worldview has been wrong. Twain was saying "if even the lowly Huckleberry Finn can recognize this, why can't the rest of 19th-century America?"
Let's be honest, understanding subtext and being thoughtfully analytic aren't exactly most teenagers strong suits. So it's easy as a young reader of Huck Finn to chalk it up as just racist garbage with some redeeming attributes. I would encourage you as an older, and presumably more thoughtful, person to re-read it and reconsider your position. Twain is one of America's greatest writers, and while if you've read Huck Finn you've probably read his "greatest"(1) work, there's still a lot else out there worth reading.
(1) - I think it was Hemingway who called Huck Finn "American's Homeric Epic", or something to that effect.
The savages aren't the heroes, but rather are there to show the lack of realistic options. Huxley himself favored a psychedelic society, which he wrote about in Island.
The same principles to manipulate the society on Brave New World are applied on the people of the Island.
You still see people being conditioned to obedience/compliance ("Pavlov used for the good, for love"), you still see use of drugs as a way to escape reality, etc...
Not to mention that is pretty clear that the society is not sustainable. A society that is not able to defend itself from the first menace is like a living organism without an immune system: it either lives in a bubble, or it is not viable.
Keep in mind John is the son of Thomas and Linda, both from outside the reservation, and shares very little with the natives.
And then apparently in one lecture they promoted an inaccurate view as to why we have reservations.
It's kind of like the Huck Finn example. If you read that book and it says the n-word -- that's one thing. But if the other two required books also say it, then it begins to get a little odd. I think people would reasonably begin to ask, "you couldn't find one book that didn't say nigger/savage in it?"
Although her attacks on the text itself were misplaced and uncalled for.
After being notified (via a form letter) of the decision to take it off the curriculum and her right to appeal said decision - which she does, requesting it should be removed from the required reading list for the whole school district and not just that which her daughter attends. Despite attempts by the faculty and principal to explain the meaning of the book she apparently still believes it's a work of non-fiction. Cluelessness all round...at best. At worst, abuse of process as a poor justification for a shakedown.
I'd call it a primed typo. She does use the term non-fiction multiple times, although I don't think anyone could believe they are.
And honestly, are people that offended? What percentage of ppl in the US care? What percentage of Blacks and NI care about Huck Finn and BNW respectively?
Maybe the saddest thing is that people like Rbanffy will use this to fuel a conspiracy that there is some nationwide outrage around these books, when none exists.
I guarantee you there is a thousand times more outrage in the US over the existence of the Koran.
"People like Rbanffy"... I am not sure what you intend to imply by that.
You might not have been aware of that, given that you seem to think that everyone should just get over it and not be offended by things that don't offend you.
By the time the events you mention happened, my family was still coping with having to leave its ancestral home after WWII and having to move to Brazil as refugees.
We can hold grudges for many generations if we want, or we can learn from the past and move on.
And asking children to read books from the past, without giving them the tools and context to understand it, is asking for trouble.
US high schools are a playground of intolerance. At least where I went to high school, having the class read a book that made use of "nigger" would have certainly meant that the Black kids in class would be called nigger after class -- of course when the students were confronted they might say something like, "I was just trying to memorize some key lines from the book".
I'm not against reading books from the past, but I think the teachers need to be prepared to teach it. In this case it appears that the teachers weren't.
Like I said elsewhere, this whole mess is depressing. Sometimes I wonder if our species will be able to find a way out of this or if I will just wish the cockroaches better luck...
If we don't, we will perpetuate cycles of injustice across generations and invite the worst of our past into our children's future. We must constantly draw lines and learn from our mistakes, even the ones made centuries ago.
We must also be careful on how we preserve our culture and our ways of life. The NA/AD culture shock that's in the root of this present discussion shows us how little progress our species made in deciding where to place the assimilation/integration divide. We try hard to be multi-cultural but, in the end of the day, we are much closer to naked apes than we may be comfortable thinking. Most of the battles we must fight were bred into our brains and we must fight them within ourselves.
Please, don't think I am a jerk. Our differences, be them skin color, language or cuisine are not as important as we make them. If we face those differences, I trust we can solve them. If we had done that a couple generations ago, we could have prevented a whole lot of suffering.
http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2010/11/brave-new-wor...
For example, look at the health care debate. Headline news for over a year. Here's a quiz, ask 10 people to name 3 concrete aspects of Health Care reform. I tried an not one person game me 3. A few gave me two. The mode was zero concrete aspects.
The narrative never was the bill itself. What everyone did know was that Obama and the Dems won and the Republicans lost, and it it costs a lot of money. For a year of coverage, this was the only narrative. Win/Lose + costs money.
A lot of people wonder if the decline of newspapers means that things like city council meetings don't get coverage. I've discovered that you often get better coverage from reading a couple of blogs -- and there almost certainly will be better targeted blogs than you get from your major city paper.
Are they all "banned"?
A very contrived example of a similar vein would be: Cooking with a Microwave isn't on the reading list. 1984 isn't on the reading list because some bureaucrat didn't like how it portrayed the government.
Again, I have not read this book and know nothing of how it portrays individuals in it, except that some person didn't like this portrayal. I know nothing of the accuracy of the portrayal, the intention of the portrayal or anything like that. I am attempting to create two instances of a book "not being on the reading list" and their absence from it being due to two starkly different reasons. Any reading beyond that is a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of what I said and attempted to say
Taking something off a reading list isn't interfering with access. ("They won't read it if it isn't on the list" doesn't change things as it applies to everything that's not on the list and you're arguing that the reason matters.)
There's nothing wrong with objecting to how a reading list is selected, but no matter what the reason, that process does not ban anything.
Yes labelling something as a "ban" has persuasive power, but that doesn't make the label accurate.
Such mis-labelling actually makes it harder to get people to react to actual wolves, so to speak.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Is it equivalent to "the person making the decision is a bad person and the person objecting is a good person"?
If you're claiming that the reason for the decision is bad, shouldn't you argue that point with some specificity? (There are lots of reasons why a decision might be bad - surely you should mention which ones apply.)
You really should. It's a very good one. But don't ask me for anti-depressants when you finish it.
Because the intent is the same, it should be treated and vilified as a ban.
A defacto ban is "We're removing it from our reading list, removing it from our library... but we not discouraging our students from reading the book". Removing it from a reading list isn't a defacto ban, it's modernization. If the kids at a specific school don't seem to respond well to a text, PULL IT. I don't care what text, even if it's one of my own beloveds just PULL IT and put in something the children will read and will learn from.
Brave New World is a classic, beyond perhaps, but if kids today aren't learning from it then so long. For every new book that goes on the list, an old one is going to come off of it. I'd much rather see kids get something like Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett that they'll respond to. Fuck, give them Harry Potter or a goddamn Halo novel if the kids will actually read it.
> it seems a Native American student who was required to read the book took issue with the its depiction of native people. The girl's mom, Sarah Sense-Wilson, agreed...
The child misunderstood the terminology being used and the parent likely didn't read the book to comprehend the difference. However, on face value we have no way of understanding the full situation. Is this a school with a high-percentage of native students where the terminology, time and time again will be misunderstood?
Just because this is the first student to complain and the first parent to be a decent enough (if misguided) parent to actually follow through with their child's complaint, doesn't mean this isn't the first child to be turned off in this school from the terminology.
Change 'Savage' to Nigger and you'll offend black students in other areas, perhaps Chink and you'll offend Asian students. It just happens that this book has bad terminology for the students that were reading it that is preventing at least this student from getting to the meaning behind the words.
Furthermore, this could all have been avoided by competent teachers. Perhaps introducing the book before requiring students to read it would have avoided this. We're dealing with 80 year old books with 80 year old social mores and terms. You're going to get problems sooner or later somewhere or other. It's inevitable, get over it assign a different book with the same message.
It's notable that the US is one of the few countries where private schools have a huge lead on public schools. I remember when I was in highschool in the UK that it actually came out that (on average) private school students graduated a grade-average lower than public school students. It's good if you're in a slum area, but if you're in a slum area you don't have the money to pay for private school to begin with.
That seems like a very weird understanding of education to me. The whole point of the exercise is getting children to read something they might otherwise miss. If students oppose a book's content - very good, you have a debate running, and you can clearly learn from that (e.g., Huxley's use of the term savages does not dehumanize them, quite the contrary).
Education is not about taking the easy path to something, it's about taking the hard path, and learning on the way.
I would go as far and explain those parents who are so afraid of it, that it's just a word that means something for the "civilized" characters of the book that's very different than it means to us or them.
And that "civilized" is also just a word.
Meaning is in the brain of the reader. A book is only dehydrated knowledge. You have to add a brain to it.
Oh boy... Why not ban Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 while we are at it. And let's burn all copies too.
What kind of spineless school principal is this?
Sometimes people are wrong. In fact it happens a lot. Apparently calling someone out for being wrong is as bad as calling someone out for being fat. Can't have controversy!
Huxley is spinning in his grave.
Huxley was cremated.
Really I just want a required class in formal logic for everyone.
I many times support the formal logic requirement.
Unfortunately, they bend over backwards to please kids who complain to their parents about how crappy their school is.
Please, make the argument that it isn't the case on this particular book, but I'd say no book belongs in English classes because of the warning or political message it delivers. At the high school level, different (academically higher?) standards are looked at. This may include _Brave New World_, or it might not, but taking offense that a popular dystopian fiction novel isn't in the curriculum any longer isn't the right argument: removing an important work on literature and replacing it with a less important one is.
I found the idea of banning a politically loaded book (that speaks of, among other things, banning books) irresistibly funny. I am not sure Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 are required reading in the US, but they should be. They should be required reading everywhere.
Screw you Thomas Hardy, you're off the curriculum, some 14 year old has decided you lack literary value because they find all those descriptions of countryside dull and don't want to read them.
(Obviously in this instance that 14 year old would have been me and I'd have been right but I'd also have said something similar about Dickens and been about as spectacularly wrong as it's possible to be).
1984 made me miserable. But it also helped make me into the man I am now.
Now maybe if one takes the position that hardship and grief are somehow morally virtuous (a position that is surprisingly common and that I as, I think, a rational person have a very hard time understanding, especially since the reasons for it are very seldom given in coherent theories) there is merit to this argument. But even then I still fail to see why the 'savages' in the book, or the protagonist, are somehow morally better than the other people.
So if anyone has read the book and wants to explain why they feel the world described in there is bad, I'd be very interested to hear why they think so.
(I'm leaving aside some what I think are minor issues, like the apparent destructive qualities of soma addictions - that was one of those other points I felt Huxley just put in there to get his point across, the technical deficiencies of the drug are irrelevant to the moral position he's (presumably) arguing).
That you don't even find it dystopic is probably another sign that it's actually the parody of the world we're living it; superficial, commercial, filled with porn and vulgarity, reality TV and shitty music, individualistic and thoughtless. We don't even need a Thought Police to enforce proper thinking.
(that said, calling the society of Brave New World to be similar to ours is hyperbole, and I'd pretty sure that it's not why I feel the way I do about the book. Don't forget that the 1930's had their own 'shitty music and vulgarity', in the form of jazz and skirts that showed ankles. It's so easy to make an extremely generalized case for why Brave New World resembles any society; hell I figure that some grumpy inhabitants of Pompei would make the same argument about their city 2000 years ago.).
With one picture we can explain reality TV, crappy music, Chopin and Huxley.
Most probably sheep are perfectly happy in their pen. Being perfectly happy because you don't think about why you live and what you may be good for isn't in my opinion a good way to be happy. My opinion is that human being should aim higher than living an happy cattle life. These are personal values, but I think that some values are better than others, and that general relativism isn't good.
And about the intellectual snobbery : I am a proud intellectual snob. Intellectual snobs know better, that's why I chose to be one :)
I'm not sure. Some other posters also brought up a similar argument. I'm not convinced that there is a moral ordering or ways to be happy, as long as the criteria are constrained to internal ones (i.e., as long as the criteria don't affect others - a society of 9 male rapists and one woman is presumably one where 90% of the population is happy, but that doesn't make it a just or right society)
I don't agree that hardship and/or grief are required for great achievements. On the contrary, I think that most achievements are done by people who are already in the 5th layer of Maslow's hierarchy. It's subjective what 'great achievement' is, but in the trend of this site, let's take some big software companies; were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg living in mud huts, going to sleep every night feeling hungry? I don't know the details about any of them, but it seems from a cursory Wikipedia glance that all of them grew up in environments where the 'happy cattle life' was the norm, and it was some other internal motivation that drove them to create and not a desire to get away from hardship.
Also, note that I didn't say 'intellectual snobbery', but 'pseudo-intellectual snobbery'. Being a rebel for rebellion's sake, agitating against everything that is mainstream, is not intellectualism, it's mostly a trait of wannabe students and hipsters who are still in their formative years and derive their self image from contrasting themselves with the rest of society. Now actual intellectual thought can also be contrary to mainstream thinking of course, but it needs to be backed up with solid reasoning from data, axioms etc. and not with 'most people are stupid, so what most people are thinking is wrong' (even leaving apart that by definition it's impossible for most people to be stupid, unless one sets the benchmark for stupidity at an arbitrarily high level, at which point it's just definition again).
This is an interesting and debatable matter. I'm probably not really convinced too :)
> I don't agree that hardship and/or grief are required for great achievements.
Neither do I, but I don't seem to have implied it.
I'll quote a passage from the Wikipedia article on it that expresses just one frightening aspect of the society described in the book.
Natural reproduction has been done away with and children are created, 'decanted' and raised in Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, where they are divided into five castes (which are further split into 'Plus' and 'Minus' members) and designed to fulfill predetermined positions within the social and economic strata of the World State. Fetuses chosen to become members of the highest caste, 'Alpha', are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in "decanting bottles", while fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes ('Beta', 'Gamma', 'Delta', 'Epsilon') are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth.
I mean I'm all in favor of letting and encouraging people to develop themselves into who they want to be, but the society in the book is one where everybody is everything he/she wants to be! I fail to understand the moral wrong in that.
My desire to be a productive person stems from my experiences with short term happiness. No matter how many movies, video games or hobbies I enjoy in the short term, I will eventually feel a lack of deeper fulfillment if I don't accomplish something significant.
The happiness offered by the system in BNW seems to provide only this fleeting happiness without addressing the longer term "contented" style of happiness. I think this is what people react negatively to. It is hard to imagine a "cheat" to fulfillment because so many people spend their lives searching for it unsuccessfully.
The characters in BNW have apparently been modified or conditioned to lack this drive. Or their drive has been subverted to meet the goals of society. Whether you think this type of happiness can or should be provided artificially is up to you.
However, humans being what they are, it seems impossible to guarantee that lack of desire. This is (kind of) demonstrated by Bernard's discontent and by John the Savage's inability to cope with the society. Both were weak cases. Bernard because he was privileged, and John because he was a total outsider that was not acclimated to the culture.
Does slavery become alright as long as you brainwash slaves into thinking they are content?
Well that's my question. It stops being "slavery" at the point that the "slave" doesn't feel like a slave anymore and is happy about their situation, doesn't it? I see on television (yeah, I know...) people in SM lifestyles who go out on the internet to find somebody who they can give complete control over their lives, much like a slave I guess. Is that OK? I see no problem with it.
I know you say 'thinking they are content', which is different from what the book says (and I'm assuming the SM slave is also truly content, and not made believe to be so, or psychologically damaged to the point they can't recognize content). The book says that they were actually content, I'm reasoning from that assumption. I guess one could say 'it's impossible to make people truly content through these means"; fine, that's a valid position, and I agree. I'm just going from abstract assumptions as they were framed in the book.
Why I feel it's a bad world... Stunting natural fetal growth and then torturing small children to condition them into complacent compliance with their destined roles seems morally indefensible to me.
(Incidentally, soma was repeatedly described as side-effect free. I'm curious where you read it as having destructive qualities.)
Yeah that's a good point. Initially I classified that with the 'minor issues' I mentioned, that I felt he just introduced to scare the reader, but revisiting it it seems like it's a pretty fundamental part of the described system, if you can't engineer the fetuses into children who are already happy and OK with their place in society. Then again, it's been a while since I read it, wasn't the engineering meant to produce A or B or whatever type people, and the scene with the children not so much about conditioning their place in society but something else? Sorry I'd have to dig out the book.
(I know this sounds like I'm advocating for engineering fetuses to be complacent children but I'm not - I'm just saying that in the system in the book as a whole I don't see much of a problem with it, much like genetically engineering fetuses to correct for a birth defect, if we could do that.)
"(Incidentally, soma was repeatedly described as side-effect free. I'm curious where you read it as having destructive qualities.)"
The mother of the protagonist, the one who was 'rescued from the savages' (sorry don't remember names), got a severe soma addiction that killed her in the end, no? I don't remember reading explicit mentions of being side-effect free. I thought there were several mentions of a maximum amount that people should take.
I know it's a bit of a value judgment, but while happiness is hardly something to look down on, I find it difficult to believe that it's the only end worth pursuing.
I guess that I understand the gut feeling of uneasiness with the society presented in the book. It's that I can't find a rational explanation for it that bugs me. (one could do this one away by dismissing the value of rationality, but that I don't want to do - it's a value judgment too there, but one I hope people on here would understand and agree with).
Yes, Huxley could be cruel on his depicting of the native stereotypes (like most elitists during his days). But besides stereotypes, I think it's equally important to educate kids about ideologies -- and the big social and political systems we live in -- with that in mind few literature titles could come even close to Brave New World.
The best book I was assigned to read in high school was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I later read most of Potok's other books on my own. A few years ago I reread The Chosen--that is a very fine book for a reader of any age.
Anyone who played a part in releasing the statement should be fired for failure to understand the concept of a free society.
The rational for government supported education is that a democracy needs educated citizens to survive. The people involved obviously don't grasp that.
Or maybe they've just read and understood Brave New World all too well.
At least it had nothing to do with the fact that natural born people need to have sex to do so, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually.
"You can't consume much if you sit still and read books."
So this woman, a graduate student, bullied the museum into removing the dioramas.
If that school focused more on educating and less on banning it, the student might have understood the context of the book.
It's clear that Huxley does not regard the 'Savage' as being savage.
Of course in this world it's much easier to be offended than to tolerate. #legalism and #liability is the death of us.
BNW isn't a great piece of literature, imo. I understand it's place in literary history, but it's aged badly, and pretty clunky because of that. The themes are certainly important, and will continue to be retold, I'm sure.
There's great modern literature and contemporary YA fiction that is far more entertaining and tackles equally difficult moral issues.
"Brave New World takes place in London... I'm left wondering how many Native American reservations are near London, England."
The reservation is in New Mexico. Two of the characters go on a trip there and meet a white man that lives among the native americans, but is not fully accepted by them.
TThe above is just another comment by someone that does not appear to have read the book.
Catch22 is another I remember only vaguely but need to reread.
No, but the mother lacks human value.