I recently came across a book written by an American teacher, former New York City and State Teacher of the Year. The Underground History of American Education is a polemic about compulsory schooling (as opposed to compulsory education), and its claim that schooling is a vast social engineering scheme to keep people in their place, strikes me as uncannily similar to Brave New World. For example,
"In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Some form of BNW, in other words, may have already been in place well before the novel was written.
The book is available on-line at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/
Alastair
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http://members.lycos.co.uk/afarrugia/
One must live the way one thinks, or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget (1852 - 1935)
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King Jr.
"In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Some form of BNW, in other words, may have already been in place well before the novel was written.
The book is available on-line at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/
Alastair
--
http://members.lycos.co.uk/afarrugia/
One must live the way one thinks, or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget (1852 - 1935)
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King Jr.
