Education In Fahrenheit 451

Education in: Fahrenheit 451 and the World of Today

Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, is a dreamer, inventor, and visionary. So are Frederick Douglass, and Malala Yousafzai. While these three activists have voiced many powerful ideas about who holds and feeds us our knowledge, our freedom, our education, our finances, and the list goes on; what they share is a belief in the near spiritual elation real education can bring about and that once a person gets a taste for real education, it is addictive. They each express the uplifting quality of education and how it elevates and adds richness to the human condition. They do so harshly juxtaposed against dystopian worlds, slavery, and war torn nations. They each, in their own way, underline that oppression is found in the absence of equal distributions of knowledge. For these authors, education is the solution. Ray Bradbury writes about a dystopic world of book burning, militarism, and populations of simple minded humans. His creation resembles our current world in many ways. He then destroys his violent fantasy, kills all the unconscious humans, and releases a

He begins by describing a similar experience to Bradbury's protagonist. Bradbury writes of Montag’s book thefts: “So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.” It was impulse that took the books, not choice. He could not be stopped. Comparably, Douglass describes his households increased oppressive tendencies. For example, his masters began holding him accountable for his whereabouts to ensure he was not off reading. The oppression was however, “too late.” “The first step had been taken. Mistress by teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell [45inches]” (Douglass,