Miranda: O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206
—–
Utopias seem much more attainable than one may have previously thought. And we are now faced with a much more frightening thought: how do we prevent their permanent fulfillment?…Utopias are attainable. The way of life points towards them. But perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will find means of preventing utopias, and we will return to a non-utopian society, which may be less perfect, but will offer more freedom.
—Nicolas Berdiaeff
My love of science fiction (SF) has its roots firmly in Marvel comic books from the 1970s and the SF novels of Arthur C. Clarke and Niven/Pournelle. When I became acquainted with what teachers called “good” and “real” literature, I was immediately drawn to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as anointed SF writers.
As an adult, I am the sort of SF reader who treasures Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood, and if I am pushed, I have to admit I value Orwell more as an essayist than novelist and always enjoyed Huxley’s Brave New World over 1984—believing both works are brilliant, but preferring BNW as a reader.
The opening passages are two foundational quotes behind the message of BNW, the Shakespeare the source of the title and the Berdiaeff a nod to Huxley’s parody of utopian fiction.
In his Foreword to the Perennial Classic edition of BNW, Huxley explains:
But Brave New World is a book about the future and, whatever its artistic or philosophical qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophesies look as though they might conceivably come true….The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. (p. ix)
Beyond purpose, Huxley continues, speculating about “A really efficient totalitarian state”
would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers….The great triumphs of of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about the truth. (p. xii)
SF, at its best, however, is not predictive, but cautionary; as Neil Gaiman has reminded us, “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.” Thus, Huxley warns:
Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to infect others with their discontents….In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate….Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science [1], not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms…or else one supra-national totalitarian. (pp. xiii, xiv)
And then, Huxley conclude: “You pays your money and you takes you choice” (p. xiv).
The speculative and cautionary possibilities found in SF rarely come to fruition in the real world in the dramatic ways of novels or films (or in the somewhat looney ways political factions rant and rave in public discourse). So it seems likely that we are apt never to listen or to act in ways that we should and could.
Huxley, I think, was in many ways speaking to this—“The Not-So-Hidden Cause Behind the A.D.H.D. Epidemic”:
Between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012, people across the United States suddenly found themselves unable to get their hands on A.D.H.D. medication. Low-dose generics were particularly in short supply. There were several factors contributing to the shortage, but the main cause was that supply was suddenly being outpaced by demand.
The number of diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has ballooned over the past few decades. Before the early 1990s, fewer than 5 percent of school-age kids were thought to have A.D.H.D. Earlier this year, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 11 percent of children ages 4 to 17 had at some point received the diagnosis — and that doesn’t even include first-time diagnoses in adults. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them.)
That amounts to millions of extra people receiving regular doses of stimulant drugs to keep neurological symptoms in check. For a lot of us, the diagnosis and subsequent treatments — both behavioral and pharmaceutical — have proved helpful. But still: Where did we all come from? Were that many Americans always pathologically hyperactive and unable to focus, and only now are getting the treatment they need?
Probably not. Of the 6.4 million kids who have been given diagnoses of A.D.H.D., a large percentage are unlikely to have any kind of physiological difference that would make them more distractible than the average non-A.D.H.D. kid. It’s also doubtful that biological or environmental changes are making physiological differences more prevalent. Instead, the rapid increase in people with A.D.H.D. probably has more to do with sociological factors — changes in the way we school our children, in the way we interact with doctors and in what we expect from our kids.
As disturbing as this is, the final paragraph of this article may be the most significant:
Today many sociologists and neuroscientists believe that regardless of A.D.H.D.’s biological basis, the explosion in rates of diagnosis is caused by sociological factors — especially ones related to education and the changing expectations we have for kids. During the same 30 years when A.D.H.D. diagnoses increased, American childhood drastically changed. Even at the grade-school level, kids now have more homework, less recess and a lot less unstructured free time to relax and play [emphasis added]. It’s easy to look at that situation and speculate how “A.D.H.D.” might have become a convenient societal catchall for what happens when kids are expected to be miniature adults. High-stakes standardized testing, increased competition for slots in top colleges [emphasis added], a less-and-less accommodating economy for those who don’t get into colleges but can no longer depend on the existence of blue-collar jobs — all of these are expressed through policy changes and cultural expectations, but they may also manifest themselves in more troubling ways — in the rising number of kids whose behavior has become pathologized.
The rise of ADHD diagnoses and medications has run concurrent to the accountability era in education, sharing the same thirty-year history. O brave new world of high-stakes accountability and the ADHD medication needed to make the students love their servitude to the tests…
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
So glad you commented on this article — I found it connecting with a piece on reading that I found through Exchange Everyday. The author had done some research and finds there is no evidence that teaching children to read at age 5 makes them better readers in 3rd or 4th grade. In fact, the evidence would tend to support not teaching reading until children are 6 or 7. What are we doing in preschool? We want them to learn phonics, and recognize words, and do addition and subtraction, and all without wiggling! We need to take back the early years, and give children time to grow, at their own pace. They will get where we point them — but with more joy!
Reblogged this on the new century educator.