Brave New World Writing

For my Brave New World essay, I plan on using the video by Sir Ken Robinson to bring outside work into my argument.  As I wrote in my last posting, I like how Robinson compares today’s education to assembly lines.  He says that in today’s society, kids are being educated with a production line mentality, which limits the possibilities of critical thinking and going against the grain.  Students are assembled by age and educated by the batches based solely on their age.  Common interests are not acknowledged and students are not allowed to really expand on one each other’s thoughts.  And if kids are having a tough time focusing and staying on task, they are given dangerous drugs that force them to focus and become alert.

The comparison I see between today’s learning and the conditioning in Brave New World include the idea of educating or conditioning by the batches and not allowing teaching authority to be challenged.  Sir Robinson points out that during a longitudinal study researchers found that their subjects’ divergent thinking percentages decreases as they grow older.  Schools don’t allow these students to look for different possible answers.  They limit their thinking and teach the students to look for one correct answer without exploring many different potential answers.  Not being allowed to look at things differently really limits creativity and hinders the development of divergent thinking.  Within Brave New World, we see that once the young ones are conditioned in a certain area, they are pretty much useless in any other field.  This is evident when Linda exclaims, “There’s so much one doesn’t know; it wasn’t my business to know.  I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world-well, what are you to answer if you’re a Beta and have always worked in the fertilizing room” (122).  Linda points out that she really had no other knowledge except how to do her job in the fertilizing room.  People from the “civilized society” have no ability to think critically.  They don’t even know any basic knowledge.  They are simply trained to do their job and that is it.  I plan on looking in to Sir Robinson’s video and really comparing today’s educational state to that of the one in Brave New World.