The Play First Summit: Let's Build a Paradise from Hell
I despise the novel Lord of the Flies. I hope they're still not making kids read it. As I passed through middle school, high school, and college I had to read this mean, nasty piece of work no less than three times. I'm not saying it isn't well written. I'm not even saying it isn't worthy
literature. No, what puts this book on my bottom shelf, spine turned toward the wall, is its ugly take on human nature. William Golding held the Hobbsian view that people are essentially evil and that if left to our own devices, without the strong control of institutions like governments, churches, and schools, we would revert to a warlike state of every man for himself. Even as an adolescent, I resented that Golding had set up an opportunity to examine paradise by proposing a group of boys my age being stranded alone on a tropical island then, instead of utopia, had them create a kind of hell. That they are ultimately saved by Her Majesty's Navy makes it almost impossible to stomach.
It's not alone in being a good book based on bad philosophy. But this novel, because so many people my age have read it, has become a kind of cultural touchstone, frequently brought up in argument as "evidence" that we can't trust children or poor people or Black people or anyone for that matter to do anything good without a great white master strictly enforcing rules that have been passed down from on high. I can't count how often people have evoked Lord of the Flies at me as a CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: The Play First Summit: Let's Build a Paradise from Hell
