Lessons Learned From 1984

As I began thinking about this paper, I wondered why am I still required to take English? Each subject seems to have a direct connection to my daily life. Science allows me to understand the way the physical world works through qualitative analysis, and mathematics provides the tools required to quantitatively understand the physical world. The social sciences give me the opportunity to look at the past to learn from the mistakes of others and garner an understanding of the social world works. Finally, a foreign language allows me to communicate in the international community and learn about the cultures of the world. However, English does seem to be the exception after junior high school, most students have a strong enough grasp of the English language to read and write technical papers, memos, and communicate with others. Consequently, what is the purpose of studying English in high school and college? In the book 1984 by George Orwell, we see a situation where the government is using a language where every idea is only expressible with one word to control the population. This population is unable to rebel due to the fact that they are not able to effectively spread ideas through language.

One of the major activities that the corrupt government in 1984 catalyzes is the change from the English language to “Newspeak,” a language where, as one of the characters puts it, “every concept … will be conveyed by exactly one word” (52). This core motivation behind “Newspeak” is to remove all words from the English language that could be used to subvert or energize a population. The vocabulary that they are leaving would be similar to having our education in English end at the end of junior high school. This limited vocabulary contains t...

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...at novels, poetry, and speeches to see how some of the greatest minds argued their points in order to craft arguments of our own. Furthermore, the reason that Big Brother was able to stay in power was because the people did not have the tools necessary to analyze the fallacies in his argument and with no tools to create an argument against him, they had no method of rebellion. On the other hand, we see rebellion every day, editorials are commonly written about those in power and the constant discourse (while sometimes tedious) keeps a vast majority of the United States informed and forces us to consider the arguments presented by leaders in a new light. Therefore, we still take English in high school and college in order to understand the various arguments presented to us everyday and as we saw in 1984, weak education can lead to the subjugation of an entire nation.