Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 1, “Utopia or Dystopia: The Nature of Power” (7th-8th)
Hello, Families and Students!
Today was our introduction to the course and the concept of Utopia. What exactly is Utopia, and why are we as humans so obsessed with the idea of a perfect society? Is it even possible? Is it even something we SHOULD strive for? And why? Also, what causes theoretically perfect systems to devolve into chaos? In other words, how do Utopian ideals result in Dystopian realities? In this course, we will address all of these large, political, philosophical questions that people – and specifically people in power – have been asking for thousands of years. We will take a look at philosophy, both ancient and modern, as well as culture and society by examining works of art, watching media representations and expressions of the ideal and non-ideal, doing thought experiments, researching and comparing different real and theoretical social and political models, and even creating our own ‘ideal’ societies that we will have to make choices and decisions for when faced with real life problems.
In today’s class, we introduced ourselves and discussed the concept of utopia at length. We evaluated art depictions of two versions of cities and read about the search for Utopia in the work of Thomas More and in a few societies that tried it out in the real world, such as the French Utopians and the Shakers in America. We also went way back to Ancient Greece where we learned about Plato’s City of Ideas in The Republic and Aristotle’s uncorrupted and corrupted versions of rulership (by the one, by the few, and by the many) and watched a clip from the movie Divergent about a ‘utopian’ society divided by factions according to ability. Ask your student about some of the things we learned about that seemed fair and just and like a good idea for political organization, and some of the things that seemed destined to fail. Did anything surprise us?
Towards the end of the day, we began the first step in our weeklong culminating project and role-play game by brainstorming and beginning to form our own creative city-state. Are we going to be escapist and isolationist and establish our community far, far away – say on Mars? Are we going to be an autocracy, an oligarchy, or a democracy? How will our division of society, government power, and labor look? What will our education and religious or spiritual systems be like (if we have one), what kind of technology will we embrace or eschew? Will this city-state embrace individual freedoms, or will it be more concerned with the communal and the good of the whole? Talk to your student about their city-state development plan and what they have come up with.
Welcome to Paradise!
Or perhaps … Not?
Until tomorrow,
Ms. Rho