Topic for Brave New World

Again, I’m not quite sure what exactly it is that I want to argue in this upcoming essay. 

But I can attempt to form some sort of argument for this post.  Through Huxley’s novel Brave New World, Huxley implements ideals of extremely exaggerated progress and advancement to create a nightmare-ish world much different from our own, similar to the concept behind 1984.  However, the setting in his novel consists of a world based upon industrialization and standardization.  His dark pessimistic picture of these exaggerated ideals in his novel ultimately illustrates Huxley’s negative prediction of a society obsessed with technology and efficiency. 

An important concern I would like to address would be the presence of standardization, especially in our education system.  Sir Ken Robinson’s Youtube video provides an excellent source of commentary for this issue.  He boldly states that education is not really educating.  Rather, Robinson argues that society works to simply “get kids through education”, comparing the education system to an industrial factory.  He finds that the process of learning is of mere value; the result or finished product is the major concern with this system.  The standardizations also found in the education system hinder capacity to grow and progress in a beneficial direction.  His video gives important insights to the all too standardized education system that “educates” the youth of America, and I completely agree with his views. 

I also thought the technocracy article by Neil Postman contributed some interesting insights towards the concept of standardization beyond the educational system.  Postman argues that in a technopoly, society finds “technological calculation superior to human judgment”.  Standardized scientific measurements become the only right answer in a technopoly, since subjectivity serves as “an obstacle to clear thinking”.  Divergent thinking becomes obsolete with this mindset, and it becomes a significant problem in Brave New World as well as 1984 and the rest of the material in our curriculum for this year.  I plan on using Postman’s insights on the characteristics of a technopoly to analyze the overbearing presence of standardization in our world today. 

I hope this makes some sense...