An incisive essay posted on Valerie Strauss’s blog explains how we can use George Orwell’s classic 1984 to understand corporate-style school reform today.
The essay, written by North Carolina teacher Chris Gilbert, demonstrates that Orwell perfectly understood how lies, repeated often, tend to be accepted as truthful. Corporate reformers say the same things over and over again, expecting that in time their echo chamber will win out. Or, as Orwell puts it, “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”
Gilbert gives as an example the familiar reformer claim that poverty doesn’t cause poor school performance, but “failing” schools and “bad” teachers do. We have heard this in one form or another from Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee, and Arne Duncan. He offers this example:
“In a recent interview with TIME, Bush was asked, “What’s the role of poverty in education?” He responded, “I would reverse the question: education impacts poverty, not the other way around.”
Implicit in Gilbert’s essay is another point: Fiction can teach us as much about the present as non-fiction, sometimes even more. It is always amazing to young people–and to readers of all ages–to discover how a work written 65 years ago speaks loud and clear to us today. One could make the same points in “informational text,” but not with the same power as in a novel like 1984. That is the definition of a classic. It speaks to us across ages and continents, across time and space. It is as alive today as when it was written.
Diane Ravitch's blog 