Indoctrinated In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

“It was a pleasure to burn.” Guy Montag, the main character of Fahrenheit 451, ignites a stash of illegal books and watches with glee as the knowledge they hold turns to ash. Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a dystopian society, where books are outlawed and the value of knowledge is forgotten. While Ray Bradbury’s novel uses outside ignition to burn knowledge and thought to ash, today’s society is creating a classroom where soon all of our books may reach 451℉ and burn us all with them. In Fahrenheit 451, school becomes a place of indoctrination rather than education and any deep or creative thought is extinguished. This mind-numbing bombardment of facts and figures without analysis found in the novel becomes eerily similar to the environments

Running them ragged followed by mindless copying of facts leaves the children both mentally and physically exhausted. The result is a school day with no actual schooling. Clarisse also described the teaching process as “...a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not.” Captain Beatty credited schools with “making the word ‘intellectual’...the swear word it deserved to be.” The schools in Fahrenheit 451 teach kids facts, one sided and non-debatable facts that can be funneled down their throats and fill their minds to the very brim, so no thought can take place. Intellectuals are inhibited at every turn and are usually crushed into submission, with the exception of Clarisse, who was hit by a car and

In one school, the vice principal estimated that 37% of the month of October was given to testing, but only 33% of the students who took the test passed. The relentless and constant stream of tests force teachers to turn their class curriculum into a month long cram session that doesn't actually teach students. In order to cope, students learn to parrot back facts without any real understanding. A study conducted by Kyung Hee Kim of the School of Education at the College of William and Mary shows that creativity of American students has been in decline since the 1960s. Kim goes on the blame the “No Child Left Behind Program” as one of the reasons for this decline , stating that “Standardized testing forces emphasis on rote learning instead of critical, creative thinking, and diminishes students’ natural curiosity and joy for learning in its own right.” Standardized testing creates an environment where children come to despise learning and with that, begin to despise the pursuit of knowledge in general. This focus on “rote learning” stays with children their entire lives, hindering their ability to think at a deeper level and even to create independent and original thoughts and