Brave New Education

In Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Educational Paradigms he draws parallels between education and Brave New World. One parallel that he makes is that the drugs that doctors make kids take for ADHD shuts off their senses and deadens them to what is happening. Robinson feels that this is how parents are getting their children through school. The way this connects to Brave New World is that the soma the people take also deadens them to what is happening around them. An example of this is when Lenia and Bernard have to go talk to the Warden before they go into the reservation and "when the Warden started booming, she had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden's face in an expression of rapt attention" (Huxley 101). Children also go through school like this because they do not always pay attention and instead just sit there and pretend they are listening.

A second parallel between Brave New World and the video is that Robinson says that children are educated in batches. This connects to Brave New World because the people are produced using the Bokanovsky's Process. This is where "a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress (Huxley 6). In Brave New World the people are produced in huge batches just like how children are educated in batches. In both instances the individual is not taken into consideration but  pushed to the side to take care of just getting the big group of people through the education process so they can graduate or like in Brave New World so they can try and create as many people as possible.