Abstract
Science Fiction (SF) literature offers a ripe space to analyze and critique modern conceptions of the child and childhood. The landscapes of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island provide specific insights into the dystopian and utopian dimensions of adult–child relationships. Mapping these models onto contemporary schooling practices informs the work we do as educators and parents with an effort to reconceptualize our communities by arguing for new forms of subjectivity afforded to the child and alternative agencies that have been excluded from childhood in most educational environments. This chapter helps to identify how our adult–child interactions and educational settings approach the dystopian or utopian, and how we can reimagine these spaces with models informed by SF, thus bringing our dreams and nightmares to bear on our educational realities.
In an era of deep-sea exploration, interplanetary space travel, electronic communication technologies, and rapid technoscientific advance, some of the extravagant and utopian visions of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clark, and Isaac Asimov are becoming actualities. Yet, aspects of the surreal nightmare worlds feared by Mary Shelley , H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K Dick also are haunting the techno-culture of the Third Millennium.
Best & Kellner (2001, p. 103)
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Todd, J. (2019). A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island. In: Kupferman, D., Gibbons, A. (eds) Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_8
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