‘That learning were such a filthy thing’: Education, literacy and social control in Huxley’s brave new world

Abstract

Aldous Huxley’s continuing relevance to our current world is periodically questioned, as, for example, in John Derbyshire’s appraisal, in which he dismisses Huxley’s social and political writing as dull and uninspiring.1 While such a verdict may arguably be upheld in parts for Huxley’s wider oeuvre, the prescience of Brave New World (1932) with regard to our modern life is acknowledged even by an ungracious reviewer such as Derbyshire, who sees in its infantile hedonism a reflection of our own current Western ‘embourgeoisement’.2 Beyond the familiar scenarios of sanctioned sexual and chemical ecstasy and rampant consumerism embedded in the ‘culture industry’ of the World State lies, however, Huxley’s serious concern for one key aspect of the Enlightenment project that underpins utopianism and, by implication, satires on utopianism: education. This chapter investigates Huxley’s various critiques of formal education and mass literacy, disclosed here in his satire on different pedagogical discourses that reveal the frequently normative orientation of utopian societies. This criticism is also encoded in Brave New World’s didactic parallels in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Prospero takes on the role of master educator.