novels – Montessori Muddle

1984 or A Brave New World

rrxW1 — The future according to Orwell vs. Huxley. Image from world-shaker.tumblr.com.

World-shaker tries to draw the modern parallels to 1984 and Brave New World in graphic form.

Orwell’s (1948) distopian view of the future in 1984, warned against the government developing the ability to exert constant, repressive monitoring of everyone, controlling the means of communication and, perhaps more importantly, the use of language. Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World, on the other hand, saw a mass media using your apparent predilection for trivialities to distract you from the important things. These two books are staples of secondary school literature, and it’s easy to see modern parallels; “kinetic military action” is currently my favorite Orwellian term.

Unfortunately, drawing modern parallels to historic literature is fraught with difficulty because it’s so easy: the human brain is predisposed to seeing patterns. World-shaker’s attempt is interesting, but flawed. One of his commenter points out that he compares the entertainment website TMZ to Time.com’s news site, which only gets half as many visitors. However, the New York Times’ site gets three times as many visits as TMZ so perhaps he’s fudging the statistics a little to show the trend toward frivolous media.

There are other examples, but the graphic makes does provide a basis for an interesting conversation. The most interesting aspect is that it shows the U.S.A trending more toward Huxley, while repressive Middle-Eastern regimes seem to be trying to make Orwell’s vision more of a reality.

Discovering the Discworld: Where to Start With Terry Pratchett

Rowan Kaiser asserts that Mort‘s the best place to start to discover the wonderful novels of Terry Pratchett.

the Discworld books combine silliness, satire, philosophy, and strong characterization to create a unique, often wonderful tone that’s more than capable of supporting a series with so many installments. But the number of installments can seem overwhelming, especially given that while the books have standalone narratives, they also have consistent sets of characters who develop over the course of the series, leading to an apparently complicated web of a few different, occasionally overlapping series-within-a-series.

–Kaiser (2011): Gateways To Geekery: Terry Pratchett novels in The Onion’s A.V. Club.

My recommendation would be one of her runner-up gateways — either Guards! Guards! or Wyrd Sisters — but she makes good points. Her third runner-up, Small Gods, which is one of the stand-alone novels is one of my favorites, and was my first Pratchett book. And it got me hooked.

Pratchett’s work is intelligent fantasy, in that it’s a lot like the hard science fiction I prefer. It sets up the rules of its universe and then follows them to their logical conclusions, no matter how absurd.

I often wonder how these books would appeal to adolescents since there’s a distinct possibility that much of the quite enjoyable satire would pass over their heads. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents won the Carnegie Medal for children/young adults, but while it retains Pratchett’s characteristic style and humor, it was written for a younger demographic, unlike most of his other books. I did get one student to read Small Gods, and her response, with a grimace was, “It made me think“.

Seeing Egypt in Ankh-Morpork

Egypt-barricades-front — Anti-government protesters guard their barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square. They erected a complicated defense wall, strung a heavy electrical cable around 10 meters in front of the wall, and scattered lines of debris another 10 meters ahead of that to break up any attacks. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English)

Following the ongoing convulsions in the Egyptian streets, I’m becoming more and more impressed by the research and thought that Terry Pratchett must have put into his novel Night Watch.

Egypt-barricades-back — Anti-government protesters anticipating an attack man the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square, where they had arranged complicated defense walls and stockpiled rocks to throw at pro-Mubarak men. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

In typical Pratchett fashion, Night Watch has an amalgamation of influences, from fictional sources like Les Miserables, to historical events, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; however, the book follows a character immersed in the events that are remarkably parallel to what’s going on Egypt right now, especially with the Army trying to sit out events and things becoming somewhat medieval.

egypt-dibbler — A man sells koshari to anti-government protesters for three pounds a cup (around 50 cents) inside the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into Tahrir. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

This is the first time I’ve been able to follow a revolution so closely, and it’s largely thanks to the volumes of raw reports streaming across the twitterverse, blogosphere and media websites. Pratchett gives us the wonderful characters that highlight the inherent conflict in the revolution: the police with their conflicting allegiances; the secret police that have to be dealt with; the idealists whose high hopes are bound to be dashed on the rocky shoals of human nature; and even down to the men selling food to the protesters behind the barricades.

Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett — Night Watch

I think I’m going to have to add this book to our reading list for next year.

At the end of Night Watch, the protesters win, and barricades come down when the old dictator is deposed. However, he’s replaced by a new dictator, who turns out to be just as bad as his predecessor. To paraphrase Pratchett, they’re called revolutions because they go round and round.

egypt-campfires — In the center of the square, anti-government protesters sat around campfires and talked - as they have for the past nine nights of demonstrations. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English - Feb 4th, 2011)

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?

In the binomial classification, modern humans are Homo sapiens (Genus and species). But you’ll frequently see us described as Homo sapiens sapiens, indicating that we’re a subspecies of Homo sapiens. One of the reasons for this is the still unresolved question of the neanderthals.

Some recent research suggests that 1-4% of our genes came from neanderthals. If true, this would mean that humans interbred, successfully, with neanderthals. Since one of the key parts of the definition of a species is that its members can produce fertile offspring, neanderthals would then be a subspecies of human. Thus we would be Homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, as opposed to being Homo neanderthalensis, a separate species in the same genus.

Sapiens_neanderthal_comparison — Skull differences between sapiens and neanderthalensis. Image by hairymuseummatt.

Perhaps even more interesting, the same researchers who did the gene work on neanderthal bones also sequenced some bones from Siberia, and found what may well be another subspecies of humans (the original article is at Krause et al., 2010). The genes are different from what’s been found before, but are in an area, and from a time period, shared both by modern humans and neanderthals. And, modern Melanesians (from the islands north and east of Australia) may share some of the genes of the new group. So this could even be another sapiens subspecies.

There are a number of caveats to this research, which is based primarily on gene sequencing and statistics. One key assumption that I’ve always been skeptical about is that DNA mutates at a fixed rate. However, this type of science ties very closely in to our discussions of evolution and themes of what it means to be human.

There are two great novels that address these two things, but I’ll only be using one of them. The one I’ll use is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which I’ve mentioned before (here and here). The other is War Games by Brian Stableford (aka Optiman). While the Chrysalids deals with accelerated mutation resulting from nuclear fallout, War Games considers the effects and moral implications of intentional genetic optimization (hence the other title for the book).

Montessori Science Fiction

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

k-rex2 — M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.