Education In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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In the story “Brave New World”, Huxley satirizes our educational system by portraying a world where the basis for every single aspect of life is taught during a person’s prenatal and childhood stages. The educational system in “Brave New World” is classist and excessively jingoistic. Humans are bred in a strange manner is Huxley’s vision of the future; they are all raised as fetuses inside a large test tube and subjected to many forms of prenatal conditioning. For example, the fetuses bred to become plane engineers have the oxygen supply in their tube cut in half when they are positioned in an upwards position but it is doubled when the tubes are placed upside down, making them associate “topsy-turvydom with well-being” even before they are fully developed. As infants they undergo a more sinister type of conditioning. Nurses offer the infants flowers and books, but whenever an infant reaches out for it they are subjected to an …show more content…

While it could sometimes be argued that education’s sole purpose is to mold one’s mind to fit a specific standard and is largely similar to mind control in that respect, Huxley’s take on it draws it far away from most known concepts of education and more towards what people see as mind control or brainwashing. “Brave New World” was indeed an effective satire of many aspects of leisure society, as shown with the use of soma and sex but that was due to people being able to relate to those in some form with the Roaring Twenties still remaining fresh in the minds of many reads at the date of the book’s publication (1932) but ultimately no one is able to relate to the dystopian image of humans being mass-produced in tubes, children being taught their entire moral code while asleep or babies being electrocuted into submission to their government’s anti-art and anti-nature