Brave New World - Two

"'The principle of sleep-teaching, or hypnopædia, had been discovered.' The D.H.C. made an impressive pause" (pg 25).

This chapter basically described the two horrific methods of teaching practiced by this, for lack of a better term - people manufacturing plant.

In one sense, they repeatedly set up the "babies" to fail.  By doing so, they are basically forcing this group of youngsters to hate whatever they are being exposed to - in this case, books and flowers.  Short term goals are obviously to make the fear the object in question, but long term, this repetitive nature could easily backfire.  What if, when one of these adventurous "people" go out into the country see a book, he does not get zapped?  Will he just assume he somehow glitched the system and is now free to read, or will he rebel against his evil overlords and reserve his position as king in advance?  Okay, maybe I am over-exaggerating, but this seems prone to many backfires.

The other form of teaching is also through repetition, but this form is subconcious.  While the babies sleep, their pillows send them messages which are aimed to make them believe certain notions as being true - basically implanting the caste system into their malleable brains.  Now, this idea may sound good on paper, but I have tried sleeping on my textbooks, and it does not work (not really, but I have heard it does not work).  Also, some people sleep very heavy and would no doubt not get the memo that they were supposed to have received.