Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as a Lens Viewing Todays College System
It is sometimes surprising at how simple it is to be mediocre at college. I also marvel at the difficulty at excelling. It is easy to maintain the status quo, but to consistently surpass it demands a continued concentration. I think that I am capable of being this way, but I often give myself physical evidence to the contrary. This worries me because to have a job is to work all day Monday through Friday without leniency. I’ll worry about that when the time comes I guess. I must argue that college is less rigorous than I expected because my early thoughts of college was that the teachers were passionate about their work, and forced you to be the same way. I have had professors who haven’t read the texts they require us to read. I’ve had professors who speak English so poorly that it’s amazing they got a job anywhere, not to mention a university. I’ve had teachers who show up to class less than I do, and ones who grade papers without turning to the second page. It is not a professor’s fault if the redundant cycle of churning out students using the same teaching materials can become monotonous. What is worse is that since a college uses the same itinerary for all of its students within a major, it has to be achievable by all who are entered in that program. Similar to how newspapers are written at an elementary school level, it is necessary to lower the standards so the most amounts of people meet them. This is why I believe that college is not as rigorous as I thought, or as it could be. The education level is not maxed out to the highest potential the professors are able to teach at, instead it has to make sure it is understandable to the bottom tier of students. This hinders many educations because a lot of students are not being prodded hard enough. A student learns to complete the minimum and not strive for anything further, and the minimum is barely scratching the surface of both the topic and a students intellectual abilities. When the Savage goes to see Mustapha Mond, they discuss many things regarding the futures isolated and highly structured society. It is during this discussion that Mustapha Mond explains that it is wrong to force someone with a higher intellect to do work below their intelligence, “An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron workâÂ?¦ We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space” (151). The latter portion of the quote is saying that if someone was forced to use only part of their intelligence, and forcefully repress the rest, it would lead to mental torment. Drawing parallels to the college system, it draws from the education of the intellectual when the program he is forced to follow is drawn up for mediocrity. It limits the ability of the mind to grow, and keeps minds from blossoming as open and far as it has the potential too. This, coupled with the suppression of curiosity, and a mind can be shaped to fit the needs of society instead of fitting society into a person’s identity.
College as far as I see it does not promote curiosity as much as it should. It is a collection of the intellectual youth of America. This should create a great sharing of knowledge amongst its students, which would breed a higher education, and infinitely smarter adults. Unfortunately the stiff structuring of college does not promote curiosity. By channeling people into controlled programs, everybody is learning the same things, and is told to look at all of this information in the same way. All personal reflection is to be done on personal time, and it is very rare that an assignment requires personal opinion. Instead, most is the regurgitation of things learned in class or from books. I understand the important of learning from the past or, “on the shoulders of giants”. But if there is never to be personal reflection then the knowledge we absorb does not have any individual pertinence. Our economic security is based on the skills we are taught from school, and not in the personal passions that we may pursue in our private time. Since economic security is vital to survival in American society, the urge to explore our own minds and expand our perspective has been suppressed. The majority of our lives are spent perpetuating an economic system which helps run the country. Our own thoughts are bound to a small portion of our lives. In Brave New World, society is set up before birth. With Bokanovsky groups spawning children out of test tubes by the thousands in a single batch. All in a batch are identical in every way, and are destined to all work the same job. This is a metaphorical allusion to the college process of today. We are cranked through a system that, upon graduation, we are sent into the real world almost completely identical to anyone else coming out with the same degree. In Huxley’s future society, scientists not only control their fate, but how they think and view their role. No one questions the way the system works because they are told through hypnopaedic recordings that the system is amazing, and when people all think the same way, it is not thought that anything needs to change. When scientists tried to build a love of nature into society, the results were unsuccessful, “A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport” (14). A love of nature is a personal passion, also one that does not benefit society. Therefore it is snuffed, but what is preserved is the predisposition to use transport, which would keep people contributing to society in a positive way. Martin Luther King Jr. also saw this as a societal problem, and a paradoxes issue for a preacher to explain to his community, “When all is finally entered into the annals of sociology; when philosophers, politicians, and preachers have all had their say, we must return to the fact that a person participates in this society primarily as an economic entity. At rock bottom we are neither poets, athletes, nor artists; our existence is centered in the fact that we are consumers, because we first must eat and have shelter to live” (MLK).
The college experience is meant to shape us to fit the roles that society needs us to fill. We are encouraged to try and enjoy it as much as possible, but we are never told there are any other alternatives. Instead we are told to conform and trust the system. Conformity can kill the soul, and snuff the dreams of mankind.
College would not run without conformity. Each major has requisites that need to be filled, and does not leave much for personal choice. Perhaps we can choose between taking physics or biology, and completing a theory or methods sequence, but for the most part we are structured. It is easier to compile data about the students to gauge how successful a college is doing. With everyone taking similar schedules it is easier to correlate data. A permanent grade arrangement allows for people within a certain major to be stratified, ranking peers against each other. Conformity is also used so they can classify their outgoing students. If there was no mandatory structure then people would often come out of college with vague degrees, affluent in many areas but not an authority in any particular one. This would cause a problem for the economic goals of America. There would be fewer experts on a topic and more critiques without weight to their opinion.
Unfortunately the sacrifice made by this conformity is the loss of a personalized education. I am paying 36 thousand dollars a year for an education that I don’t get to choose. I choose a program and fill in the classes needed to receive the degree. Education should be the expansion of knowledge in the areas of interest for each person. If a school was communal about its knowledge instead of sectioning things off, I believe that knowledge would spread like wildfire, and the campus would be much more conducive to a proper education. Many of my peers do not have a passion for learning, they are just following the steps they are told to follow. Brave New World shows the blind acceptance of our society in many of the characters inability to grasp anything outside of their lives. Mothers are not only unheard of but a taboo word. The thought of marriage or even having only one sexual partner is frowned upon. An illustration of society’s inability to grasp concepts outside of their own reality is when John lives an old-fashioned life outside of the city. Seeking solitude, he abandons civilization and embraces a lack of technology and society. Unfortunately, once he is discovered, he becomes a sort of phenomenon. He attracts attention from a number of people, but for the wrong reasons. To them he is an oddity.
Why would someone want to be alone? Why would he not want soma? His opinion was not one of theirs, and he is openly mocked for it, “In a few minutes there were dozens of them, standing in a wide circle round the lighthouse, staring, laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape) peanuts” (173-174). In the same way, if one chooses to pursue a lifestyle outside of the one everyone assumes is right they will be respected, but on a different level. Horticulturalists, for example, aren’t jeered at or openly mocked perhaps, but they are viewed as radicals. Quakers are peculiar for their unwillingness to embrace technology most of us take for granted. In college there isn’t really any way to resist conformity. We are grouped so we can be sorted out and rated. Our performance in college is a determinant for how high we will be able to step when we graduate into the work force. Unfortunately they only rate us on our ability to assimilate their knowledge into who we are, or who they want us to become. Tying back to the suppression of personal thought, since there is no value weighted to it, it is often overlooked or thought of as unpractical.
Aldous Huxley makes some bold predictions about the downfall of society in Brave New World. Although many of his prophecies are exaggerated, this is merely a literary device commonly used in Science Fiction. Many ideas of Science Fiction come true, because they are ideas of where we want to, or could go. He does, however, correctly predict the shrinking value of personal curiosity. In writing of a culture completely pre-determined at birth, he alludes to a present day society where our lives are more and more determined by our jobs, and less by our own personal desires. College is the building blocks of where our jobs lead, metaphorically represented as the genetic engineering that takes place in the child factories of Brave New World.
