Butterfrumpy!!! o.O

A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is an obvious depiction of where society as a whole is headed in the mind of its author. A place where all morals are flipped upside down, where common ideals and beliefs shared by the current generation are skewed to present despicable acts done by the past. This world in which Huxley has created is our current society flipped on its head. Its’ citizens have taken the good, the bad and the ugly and have courageously gone against it to form a new society that is efficient, functioning, and altogether better in the sense of the citizens as a whole. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his character Miranda describes such a world in her own eyes as “Oh, wonder, How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ’t” (The Tempest). Huxley chose to title his entire novel after this line of the play where Miranda is speaking of the world she has missed out on her entire life and is now finally getting a taste of. She has high hopes for this new world because it seems new and exciting; however, just like John in the novel she most likely comes to the decision that she is happiest with what she is most comfortable with. This is just like what is also described in the short movie that we watched as a class, only one thing, the main idea of that video has also been turned on its head in current society. The idea behind Sir Ken Robinson’s video was to create a new society in education and to allow it to seep into the current curriculum of educators. It seems however that teachers and professors are reluctant to do so because of such examples as John from A Brave New World, or Miranda from The Tempest.  As a society we are afraid to venture into new ideas because we think that no matter how good they look at first glance, we will always eventually recognize that we are happiest as is. We will never be willing to take risks for the good of humanity because we are much too scared.

peanut butter w/ apples

The intelligent writing, or drawing some might say, of this video was one of the most clever things I have ever seen. The whole idea of the video was to bring about a reformation in the world of education, and what better way to educate your audience than to use the educational technique that you are advertising. As I looked around the classroom at my peers watching this somewhat boring lecture I noticed something, they were all LEARNING. What a concept! High school students were actually getting something out of being entertained with multi-media.  Now, ill be the first to admit that the spoken word in the video sounded as if it would burn my ear off with its boring, monotonous sound; however, once put together with the fun drawings and comics, the words began to come alive. Just as the speaker had been stating, “people learn material through seeing and doing not through hearing and reading”. Sadly this goes completely against the form of education chosen by the far superior modern educators we find in today’s schools. These days it seem as if a teacher’s only job is to get the students to sit down, shut up, and engage in boring information being forcibly shoved onto them by whatever corrupt state they happen to reside. This I can tell you (first-hand I might add) is the WORST way to learn. The information being thrown at us is so large and so stupidly inapplicable that our teenage minds only feel the need to retain it for two or three days while we wait for the up coming test to be over, then we drop everything we have “learned” and go on to trying to fulfill the next state requirement, doing any and everything we can to maintain an acceptable grade for college. The current system we have is pumping kids through schools without even giving them a chance to learn anything correctly. We, as students, are only going through the motions, being used like pawns to continue the functions of society without being given a chance to offer imagination or creativity to it’s success. This is much like the situation found in A Brave New World. This society’s main slogan goes “everyone works for everyone else”. This is crap! Where is my right to be a little selfish and look after myself rather than put my life in the hands of some reject in a wife-beater. This is the society we are becoming and I don’t like it. We are quickly heading in the direction of everyone working for everyone else, and I choose to rightfully put all the blame on the schools. We aren’t learning anything new in classrooms except how to silently use others and cheat off of one another. As for our future as a country, I’m scared because I know that old habits tend to die-hard. 

Manipulate this!!!

The quoted passage “Wheels must turn steadily, but can not turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as sturdy as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment" spoken by Mustapha Mond fully encapsulates the system of values among members of society in A Brave New World. Within the novel, human beings are engineered from conception to fit a certain social class, do a certain job, and feel different things. It is fully manipulated by men to create beings that can fit into a society that functions with the basic background lining Mond’s quote. Different classes of people are engineered to do certain things that allow society to function, this is done to allow people to be content with what they are given in life, and in turn they become focused and stable. This is exactly what is wanted by the Controller, Mustapha Mond. He states “No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individualized stability”. The only way for stability to be present among all humans helping the society to function, is to manipulate such human emotions of family, monogamy, impulse, feeling, and desire. This is partly done through the alteration of DNA at conception, but mostly done after birth with different methods of manipulation. Some examples given within the novel pertaining to manipulation of personal emotions include elctro-shock therapy, loud obnoxious noises, and the principle of sleep teaching, or hypnopaedia. Through these methods, people could be controlled and brainwashed into believing themselves happy in whatever state they were placed. The people’s happiness led to a personal stability among individual citizens, which in turn led to a societal stability for all. This is the idea behind Mustapha Mond’s stable society, and ultimately behind all of the members of the Brave New World society.

Chew on this for a spell...

In discussions and debates over William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one controversial issue that has come up time and time again has been whether or not Shakespeare had intended to allude towards the colonization of British territories in India, or whether he was writing plays for the sheer entertainment and large amount of personal giggles involved. On the one hand, sane arguments are made by people, such as George Will, who support the truth behind Shakespeare’s writings with class and respect. On the other hand, there are blithering fools, like Stephen Greenblatt, who contend that Shakespeare was an activist trying to make a statement through his writings and “high social stature”, which is widely know to be inexistent. Then, there are other even bigger ninnies who believe that Shakespeare didn’t even right most of the plays that he is credited to, but I wont even get started on this. My own view in the matter is more along the lines of George Will. I believe that Shakespeare was a simple man just trying to put food on his family’s plate and entertain the country side one play at a time, not that he was some liberal Quaker bent on improving society with the flick of a pen across the page.

In discussions over this controversial topic, the traditional view is very similar to mine in that college professors are reading too deeply into things such as this and are distorting the original purpose and thought behind literature. However, there may be other ways to think about this text. For one thing, there is a slight coincidence between the characters in this play and what was going on in the world at the time; however, these coincidences are too likely to have occurred simultaneously without affecting each other to base such a bold argument off of. There are too many factors standing in the way of the contrary arguments that easily discredit any further discussion from the opposition altogether. In all, opposition to tradition in this case does not pay off well. In fact, it doesn’t pay off at all!

Greenblatt blows!!!

In the two essays written by George Will and Stephen Greenblatt, the main focal point of the arguments centers on whether or not modern literature professors and analyzers are reading to much in to classical literature such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Will argues that “…by ‘deconstructing’ or politically decoding, or otherwise attacking the meaning of other literary works, critics strip literature of its authority. Criticism displaces literature and critics displace authors as bestowers of meaning”. This fine point is refuted by Greenblatt who states in his argument that “… Literary scholars investigate and encourage their students to consider, and [he] would think that the columnists who currently profess an ardent interest in our cultural heritage would approve”. Such an argument seems to be complete poppycock from my point of view. The way I see it is that Shakespeare was an artist; a man with a need to please a crowd and develop something on the stage that would change a person’s life for ever. Greenblatt on the other hand is an overworked blowhard who finds joy in connecting completely separate events and occasions by finding the smallest coincidences in life and exploiting them to their fullest potential. Through Greenblatt’s reasoning one might find that Obama is related to Christ, or Mr. Dominguez is intimately involved with Ms. Lederach. Such reasoning and justification is absurd when one truly thinks about it. Just because a person has a small occurrence with something in their life, does not mean that they will forever be changed by it. Even if Shakespeare had read Montaigne’s “Of Cannibal” as Greenblatt so adamantly points out, who are we to say 300 years later that he was writing about the views expressed in that book? I believe that Shakespeare and other great classical literature was written purely for the enjoyment of the people in that time and ours, anything else is just under gratified college professors trying to sound smarter than they truly are.

jiggley

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there is a clear allusion to the concept of colonization of native peoples in his character, Caliban. Caliban is seen as a lesser being that is biologically inferior to Prospero and his daughter Miranda, yet is used by the two to help tame the island and make it inhabitable. For example, Caliban is described by Prospero as being a “horrible slave, with a wicked hag for a mother and the devil himself for a father”, yet Prospero cannot effectively live on the island without his help. Even though Caliban was on the island first, Prospero took control and forced Caliban into an inferior position. If it were not for Prospero’s superior magic, none of this could have been possible; however, it was because Prospero had a huge power advantage over Caliban that he was able to take control and achieve power over the island.  This relates almost perfectly with what was written in Charles Bressler's Literacy Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. In this document, it is written that “Great Britain, the chief imperialist power of the nineteenth century, dominated her colonies…forced labor of the colonized became the rule of the day… these sub-humans or savages quickly became the inferior and equally ‘evil’ others”. So, what was believed by Prospero about Caliban was noticeably similar to what was believed by the European colonists about “heathen” natives. Prospero used his “chief” power to “dominate” Caliban into a sort of “forced labor” on the island, putting Caliban into a lesser or “sub-human” state in the hierarchy of the island. The similarities of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Colonization of Great Britain colonies are to obvious to miss, and they additionally make for some good arguments.

The Tempest Act 1

The character of Prospero comes off as a very manipulative, selfish being who has a set plan to dictate how his life will be ran. He controls all the outside variables around him to create a perfect ending to his plans, and he is persistent in making things happen to meet his expectations. Prospero doesn’t care who stands in his way, or who gets hurt, as long as in the end he can avenge himself and fulfill his selfish ambitions.

One such Use of manipulation comes from the words and rhetoric straight from Prospero’s mouth. Prospero displays a masterful understanding of how one can control the other without them really knowing what is even happening. For example, When Prospero is in need of Ariel’s assistance, he reminds Ariel of what his previous conditions used to be compared to what they are now by bringing up that he was “her servant at the time, as [he admitted himself]. You were too delicate to carry out her horrible orders, and you refused. In a fit of rage she locked you up in a hollow pine tree, with the help of her powerful assistants, and left you there for twelve years”. Prospero knew the trauma that this had caused Ariel, and he knew that bringing it up again would make Ariel feel in debt to Prospero, that is why he said this. Prospero needed Ariel’s help to gain what he wanted, so he decided to manipulate the feelings that Ariel felt through his rhetoric. This, in the end, proved very helpful to Prospero as it helped his plan go smoothly.

This Idea of manipulation goes hand in hand with what we have been studying in 1984. In 1984, the government, like Prospero, used it words and written material to manipulate the minds and thoughts of its citizens. Through this manipulation, Big Brother was able to construct a society that believed everything they heard and would die for the party at any given chance. The use of words and stories is a very powerful tool that has been used since the dawn of time, and its power is what I believe we will be studying for the rest of this school year.

First Blog

This week in class we participated in a discussion using the Socratic Circle. The discussion was centered around the new educational curriculum that Texas State Officials have adopted for their schools featuring a one-sided representation of history backed by the conservative Republican Party. Such an influence on children in schools has been argued to be unconstitutional, as if only teaching one side of history could potentially mold the general societies opinion to a more conservative view, threatening the beliefs and voices of future liberals. During our class’s time in the Socratic Circle environment, we discussed different ways to create a history curriculum that is completely objective and filled with the right kind of information for a student to know to be able to think critically about this country and its past. I believe that our best solution to this problem was to put into the history book only the situations and circumstances that happened in the past. Also, to have a panel of people, all of different beliefs and ideas, and have each person contribute to every section of history involved in the book. Finally, I would allow individual teachers to teach whatever they felt necessary. This might not seem like a great idea to some because it gives the teacher too much freedom to impart whatever their beliefs are on innocent students; however, throughout the course of schooling, a student has as many as 12 different teachers, out of these 12 there are bound to be a good amount of different ideas that the student will be enlightened to, allowing the student to make up their own opinions to carry with them throughout life. As for a history curriculum, or any subject curriculum in general being fair, I don’t believe it is possible to be completely fair or objective. Through the teaching of students, teachers will unconsciously impart their beliefs no matter what they are told. They may not do it intentionally, but it will happen; it may be through the way they act, or the way the talk, or even the way they treat others. There is no controlling the inclusion of opinion into the teaching of students, that is why I believe that the beast bet is to regulate the amount of time a teacher gets to spend teaching. If 12 different teachers are allowed 1 full year to teach what they feel is needed to be taught, then enough opinion will be introduced into the system to allow the student to form opinions of their own. I feel that the state government should just allow the teachers to teach, and keep their hands out of our schools.