In Mrs. Huff's 1A class we had a Socratic seminar about Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, during this discussion there were clashes of ideas, opinions, and reflections about the book. What we discussed in the Socratic seminar were only a few of many questions, the questions that I had attended in were question number seven, and question number three. In question number seven it had asked us to talk about the book as a prophetic vision of the future. Also to look at the aspects of the book that we found most disturbing, which hit closest to home, and which seemed the most far-fetched.
In our time of interaction we discussed these topics. There were many new ideas that few of us had thought about. But, because of these new ideas and all of the new opinions, my understanding of Brave New World has been deeply impacted. I have decided to research deeper into the meaning of the book, and have decided that our world is becoming more and more like Aldus Huxley's book. In our seminar we exchanged thoughts and opinions about which aspects of the book we found most disturbing. One of the most commonly used topics was when the children in Brave New World would have sexual interactions with each other! They are letting six-year-olds have sex! That's crazy! And because of Aldus Huxley writing about that, I have realized that the children of our society today, well, most of them know what sex and drugs and things like that are, because of the society or living conditions that they have now!
The other question that our group had was question number three, which asked "What is the significance of choosing Henry Ford as 'God'?" At first this question had most of us baffled, it took our group a little while to gather our thoughts and come up with a logical reason. Although eventually we came up with one. Our reason for Aldus Huxley choosing Henry Ford as "God" was, during Huxley's time Henry Ford was a great inventor. Henry had invented the assembly line which was capable of the mass production of Model-T Cars. Well Huxley used this great technological achievement to help write his book about how the world, with all it's technological advances, would eventually become corrupt and destroy itself. Our group could not decide if Huxley was trying to celebrate or annihilate Henry Fords reputation for the creation of the assembly line. Because, Huxley used Henry Ford as "God", and obviously that is a great position, but we are not sure if Huxley liked the creation so much that he used him as "God", to show how much he liked Ford, or if Huxley was using Ford as an example to show how much he hated the creation by using him as "God". This is a very confusing, frustrating, and very controvert topic, and we were not able to completely answer it.
Honestly, I personally liked the Socratic seminars, and I think that my participation in the two that I did, was quite good. If I were to change anything that I did, I would probably have asked more questions, and I probably would have inserted myself into even more conversations. I think that I did good in my participation in the seminars, but I also think that if I used more of the text to help my ideas, I would have been able to lengthen and deepen my ideas. And if I were to change anything about the Socratic seminars, I would change the time and the amount of them that we did, because I enjoy the seminars, I feel like I can be myself and actually talk about my ideas and my opinions, and be able to freely talk about them without being shunned or anything like that. All in all the Socratic seminars, I think, are a success, I enjoyed talking and interacting with my classmates and I hope we can do it again soon.
