Loss Of Education In Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'

Andrew Cullen

Mrs. Kent

3-4 English H, Period 6

16 November 2022

Farenheit 451 Final In-Class Essay In Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, in this story he describes the decline of education. Guy Montag, the main character, grapples with a growing discontent with his life. Ray Bradbury described a decline in education and society due to censorship and lack of information. Today, in 2022, this is as true as ever. Because of the integration of technology into all aspects of life, education has lost its personal touch and has gone digital. Fahrenheit 451, begins in a world that is obsessed with technology. Apartments feature “parlor walls” which are massive TV screens. The government censors extensively, and books are completely

Clarisse, is a teenage girl and we see how school has become a cynical, censured place that lacks free-thinkers. When she goes to school, she is told, “they don't miss me, I’m anti-social, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange,” (Bradbury 26). In the novel, the world of education, and even human interaction has become a strict sense of black and white. No longer does education encourage ideas such as “thinking outside the box” or to be creative and original. In Farenheit 451 it teaches conformity and a strict sense of being like everyone else. One can attribute this loss of free-thinking to the fall of the world into the state that it was in. The biggest contributor to this was the curriculum loss and change in values of schooling. In the book school is described as being, “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored,” (Bradbury 53). This book and more specifically, this quote shows were author Ray Bradbury feels school has become dumbed down. He describes a world which has abandoned ideas like history and literature, which I reference the aged-old quote,

The first main idea is the idea of censorship in our schools. Today across the country, a spike in banned books has occurred once again. Mainly with conservatives, a mass backlash against books that include LGBT+ ideas as well as radical political sentiments. Some of these books and censorship is with classic books such One of Us Dies in The End which describes a gay relationship. This book-banning has also led to irony, a large book targeted has been Maus a story about BOOK BURNINGS in Nazi Germany. And ultimately this is the largest form of censorship. In the United States today, politicians, parents, and school-boards have become more worried about what kids and teenagers will read, rather than giving them a complete and thorough education. This isn’t the only parallel, the removal of history is also becoming a very apparent reality in the United States. In Farenheit 451, history was entirely removed as a subject, here, we are bending and changing history reinforce a narrative. Across conservative states, bills have been passed to remove words, topics, and people from mandatory teaching. Some examples of this are in Texas, were topics such as segregation, Martin Luther King Jr, and slavery have been removed as mandatory teaching all together. However, the most extreme occurence of this was when, womens suffrage and feminism was removed from curriculum in one