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!