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| Sir Ken Robinson |
Sir Ken Robinson made some very elaborate and well-thought of points that connected themselves with the ideas stated in Brave New World. During his lecture, Robinson talked a lot about ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and brought up the medication that doctors prescribe to the children that are diagnosed with this disorder. Robinson makes a claim that this medication is overused, desperately trying to get kids to just pay attention. We surround these children with distraction on top of distraction and then force pills down their throats to get them to stop looking at their surroundings. ADHD medication is used to make kids calm down and pay attention just as soma is used in Brave New World to make things normal again. When someone is not having a good day or a good time or is looking off-track, they are more than encouraged to just take some soma and are promised that those pills will make them feel better. Soma is an anaesthetic drug. It is used to shut the senses off and deaden oneself to what's happening. For example, when the Warden was talking about the history of the Reservation, Lenina slipped into her own mental coma. "When the Warden started booming, she had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely no listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden's face in an expression of rapt attention"(pg. 101). This is a regular thing in the society in Brave New World. If the people don't want to feel it, they don't. They completely take themselves away from the situation mentally and emotionally. Another parallel I found was that of the aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which one's senses are operating at their peak. In the book, I related that to the "feelies". This is a form of art in the book in which people are on stage acting so the audience can see everything that is happening, but, by holding on to bars on the chair, the audience can completely drown themselves in the action by feeling and smelling, on top of the seeing it all happen. Every sense is being kept up on its toes, making sure the audience is fully alive in that moment.
Another great point that Robinson made was about the education and how it is modeled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it. He stated that schools are organized on factory lines with its ringing bells, separate facilities, how it's specialized into separate subjects and kids are educated in batches (age group). Robinson asked, about the educating the children in batches, "Is this the most important thing? The date of manufacture?" This one was extremely important to me because the entire novel by Aldous Huxley is based on industrialization. After Ford came along with his Model T and factory lines, he was the one who the society worshiped. After that, their world became a machine. The world leaders went out of their way to beat the face of society with the ideas of structure and the need to have order for so long until that face wore out to reveal a machine. Society became just another piece of metal that was formed to do exactly what was needed. Families were exterminated, therefore taking away emotionally links to people. Ideas that everyone belonged to everyone else and giving regular soma rations so that everyone could live their own lives in content molded the society into thinking that this was how life was supposed to be. Babies were produced in bottles by separate social classes in gigantic numbers (making one batch all look like each other), children were taught through repetition what was right and what was wrong, and they were raised to know what job they were to do for the rest of their lives. Everything was about standardization, conformity, and structure, just as Robinson pointed out about education in this generation.
Sir Ken Robinson made a lot of points that can parallel to the ideas made in Brave New World. The ADHD pills and the main purpose of them reminded me of soma. The definition of aesthetic and anaesthetic experiences reminded me of the "feelies" and another example of soma. Finally, Robinson's outlooks on education nowadays completely fit into the society in Brave New World. And I agree with Robinson on a lot that he had to say. And I still do believe that he completely awesome.
