1.
2.
In your journal, define “utopia.”
Next, brainstorm what a utopian
school system might be like.
No private ownership
 Women and men work equally –
in agriculture for 2 yrs at a time
Means no-place
and must learn one other trade
Written in 1516
 6 hr working day
 Scholars rule
 Households have 2 slaves each –
slaves are criminals
 Free medical care – euthanasia
 Community meals
 Tolerant of religions except
atheism
 Utopia
by
Thomas More



 Journal
 Early
on the above question…
utopian novels expressed selfconfidence and hope at a time when
man did not posses the ability or
technology to feed the world,
communicate with masses of people,
provide quality medical care, harness
nuclear energy.
 Why
write about a utopia failing? Do you
think utopia’s are possible?
 1984 by George Orwell (who also wrote
Animal Farm)


Published in 1949
Is a warning that we may not be strong enough
nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with
the kind of power we have learned to amass…
greater efficiency, ease, and security may come
at a substantial price in freedom that individual
liberties are surrendered and freedom lost.

Walter Cronkite
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Are these phrases true or false? How
could they be used in revolution or to
control people?
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all
shades of meaning from language, leaving simple
dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and
sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce
the total dominance of the State reducing the need
for deep thinking about language. Successful
Newspeak meant that there would be fewer and
fewer words – and it’s easier to control thought.
 In addition, words with opposite meanings were
removed as redundant, so "bad" became "ungood".
The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even
the dichotomies to a single word that was a "yes" of
some sort: an obedient word with which everyone
answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.

 Fahrenheit
451 and Lord of the Flies
 Brave New World by Huxley

Biological selection, brainwashing, and drugs to
control the population
 The

Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood
“From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need.” Feminist dystopia
 Gulliver’s

Through traveling to different lands, human
society is revealed as flawed
 The

Travels by Swift
Giver by Lowry
Confusing equality with “sameness” and
eliminating painful historic memories.
"Utopias seem to be much more achievable
than we formerly believed them to be.
Now we find ourselves presented with
another alarming question: how do we
prevent utopias from coming into
existence? …Utopias are possible. Life
tends towards the formation of utopias.
Perhaps a new century will begin, a
century in which intellectuals and the
privileged will dream of ways to eliminate
utopias and return to a non-utopic society
less “perfect” and more free.”
Nicholas Berdiaeff (epigraph to Brave New World)