Education as a means of control
...y, while simply being told what to believe. Beatty sums up the importance of school, “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?” (Bradbury, 51). Education has nearly been eliminated in Fahrenheit 451. People no longer learn about the past, or even the present. World issues are ignored, as children are taught nothing of importance. Their society does not want to produce anyone “intellectual” so that others don’t feel like lesser individuals. Everyone must be “made equal” (Bradbury, 53). For that reason, nobody is educated, or allowed to ask questions. Nobody can read a book to learn, because books are illegal, and are burned. Beatty offers a good description of society’s precepts, “If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncumbustible data, chock them so full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy” (Bradbury, 55-56). Nobody can learn anything the least bit meaningful, because people are assumed to be happy when they don’t have to think. This does not seem to be true in Fahrenheit 451, but nobody is educated enough to do anything about it. Because of the changes to education and the destruction of books, no one has the freedom to learn in or out of school, and so society suffers. Aldous Huxley is the author of the famous dystopian novel Brave New World. His society is similar to that of Fahrenheit 451 in that books are destroyed, the past eliminated. The motto “History is bunk” (Huxley, 34) has been adopted. Education has changed drastically from that of today’s society. Children are no longer taught in an ordinary school, but are educated through means called the Neo-Pavlovian process, and hypnopaedia. The Neo-Pavlovian process is conducted resembling Pavlov’s conditioning experiment with his dogs, in which he conditioned them to drool when a bell was rung, by ringing a bell to call them to dinner. In Brave New World however, Children are exposed to loud sirens and electric shock to condition them to have a life-long hatred of books and flowers. The effect is that “books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks – already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedeed indissolubly” (Huxley, 21-22). Children are educated through these conditioning lessons, so that they believe what society wishes them to believe, and fear everything else. Hypnopaedia is used not to teach facts, but to teach beliefs, to make people feel better about their caste, and to separate them from other castes. While Beta children are sleeping, a recording plays “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…” (Huxley, 25-26). People are no longer educated, simply conditioned, from before infancy, for many years. They are born into a caste, and into a job. Even those who become the smartest, the Alphas, have no real way to educate them...