¶ … Classroom: Teaching Utopias, Dystopias, and the American Dream
This article published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice in 2011 examines the advantages and pitfalls of democracy in the classroom. The author, Rebeccah Bechtold, tells of her attempt to create a utopian classroom by enabling students to design and implement their own syllabus. The class was designed so students were included in deciding "a majority of the classroom policies, grading procedures, and assignments" (2).
Bechtold states, "My hope was to create a space where teaching and text crossed, to create a learning space where our class would think about the core issues that the texts had in common and actually experience similar concerns and questions" (3). Initially the author had to address issues of trust between the students and herself. In essence she was asking her students "how would you teach the class?" (5). This question contains profound implications as the teacher must release control while the students must assume control of the content, the assessment, and ultimately the responsibility for their learning. This paradigm...
The actions of these collective groups lead only to frustration, a lack of responsibility, ineptitude, and inefficiency. What sort of world does this lead to? The people who are most capable seem to be disappearing, while the least capable are left in charge. Dagny wants to know why the capable people are disappearing, and she has to find the answer to this question in order to understand what is happening
Movie Dystopia In Time (2011) is a dystopian satire set in the year 2161 in which the ability to increase the human lifespan by purchasing time has become the new currency and the entire basis of the capitalist economy. These life-years (living years) can be bought, sold or traded, although they are mostly available to the wealthy elites while the poor and the working class literally survive from one day
Many of the advances of science in the area of technology are at best quite fearsome for human beings until they become accustomed with these functions and applications. One can only imagine how strange the creation and development of all of this must have been ten, or twenty years ago and even more so in the earlier 1900's as all of this began to fall into place in the
The degree to which they are shown as incapable of doing so -- and to which French society is shown as being equally incapable of interacting with them -- illustrate the degree to which a certain cinematic panopticon has been placed around the subjects. From the omniscient perspective of the viewer, there is no apparent escape provided from this disposition. And in this immobility and the resultant anger that drives
Envy In a somewhat more imaginative work, Yury Olesha explores more extreme actions and motives for rebellion against the new regime. His 1927 novel Envy is at once a critique of the lack of individuality and emotion in Soviet Russia and a lamentation for the failures of the human spirit in the face of the large Communist machine. Again, it is expressly and simply difference that leads to the primary conflict
Like the Pope, he is cast off in isolation, but willingly so. Like the Pope he has lost his occupation -- but again, willingly so as he has been able to retire from his former civil service job. He has chosen to live underground, that is, away from other people. Over the course of the novel, he self-fashions himself as a superior person. He sees himself as well-read, cultivated,
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