School sucks...YEAH!!

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World draws many parallels to the video posted on Mr. Dominguez' blog.  Actually, if one observes closely, they can note many similarities between the two.  After watching the video, I actually started to agree with some its ideas and thoughts.  The education system, has become a twisted version of what its principles stood for, and throughout the years, has evolved into a factory to process children's minds.

There are many similarities to Brave New World that the video points out.  Children today are separated by groups based on age and transported to school.  The school is operated in different class periods based on a bell schedule, and children are forced to labor through the same process every single day.  (Or in our case, we have a different bell schedule every day since Clovis High can't seem to make its mind on a consistent bell schedule).  Anyways, back to may point; school divides the groups of kids into those that succeed based on the school's curriculum and those who fail the school's curriculum.  We should not that these varying levels of success all depends on "grades" that the school gives out in order to classify the elite students from the struggling students.  Seeing a parallelism? In Brave New World, people are classifeid into different gruops based on their varying levels of success and intelligence.  Alphas dominate the intelligence factor in society and are thus able to receive high end jobs while at the bottom are Epsilons and Gammas whose dumbed down intelligence only serves to give them manual labor work.  This work includes a daily routine, that is both monotonous, and mindless.

In Brave New World, people are created in “racks upon racks of numbered test tubes”, very similar to our concept in school, where kids are sitting in rows and rows of desks, each performing the same routine endlessly like a mini-factory. What’s more each learning process in the novel is separate, just as subjects are in school.  There’s a room for birthing, a room for establishing a fear of books and flowers, and there’s a room for erotic play, and so forth and so on.  Furthermore, the people are split into groups during the “pregnancy” based on how dumb or successful they are supposed to be.  This can be compared to how we have different classes based on different subjects like Health, Psychology, and Physical Education.

Overall, the video gives the audience a very good comparison between the education system today with the society in Brave New World.