Educated Children: $.99 per barrel

Both Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and Sir Ken Robinson have commented on the "manufacturablity" of today's children. Huxley does so by describing the massive amounts of conformation children are subjected to (in the aforementioned novel). Robinson, through a quite snazzy video-lecture contends that the most important thing about children nowadays, as far as the school system goes, is their age.

Huxley says: "the hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre's four thousand rooms marked twenty past two. 'The hive of the industry,' as the Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work. Everyone was busy, every one in ordered motion" (146).

Robinson says: our public education system has, as of late, turned into something of a "production line mentality;" "it's about standardization."

Now, though both sources are each detailing a situation a little different from the other, it essentially boils down to the same thing. This type of standardization, of conformation, is wrong. Huxley, however, gives the hint that it does indeed make for quite the good society. In theory. However, as seen in the rest of Brave New World, domination such as this cannot function to its fullest under realistic conditions.

So being, both men disapprove of standardization. Robinson states that with conformation (in schools, to use his scenario) is not only an unfit way to mold the minds of young children, but will eventually end up hurting their mental facilities, such as their weakening of divergent thinking.

Huxley writes of what would be, without any flaws, the perfect society. Every clock is synchronized down to the section. If that is so, the people must be even more so. As portrayed throughout the novel, conformity to this magnitude either yields persons with the ability to corrupt other (and by corrupt, I mean advancing "heretical" ideas) towards the citizens of the World State and a general breakdown of the system by which the society is ruled.

Finally, both Huxley and Robinson agree on the point that standardization is detrimental to the development of a society, especially its youth.

The end. You may go about your business now.