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Sunday, August 31, 2025

K–12 education in the United States

Graduation ceremony in Oregon's Tigard High School, 2017

K–12 education in the United States includes primary education starting in kindergarten, and secondary education ending in grade 12. Government-funded free schools are generally provided for these grades, but private schools and homeschooling are also possible. Most children begin elementary education with kindergarten (usually five to six years old) and finish secondary education with twelfth grade (usually 17–18 years old). In some cases, pupils may be promoted beyond the next regular grade. Parents may also choose to educate their own children at home; 1.7% of children are educated in this manner.

In 2010, American students ranked 17th in the world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that this is due to focusing on the low end of performers. All of the recent gains have been made, deliberately, at the low end of the socioeconomic scale and among the lowest achievers.

About half of the states encourage schools to make their students recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag daily.

Transportation

Transporting students to and from school is a major concern for most school districts. School buses provide the largest mass transit program in the country, 8.8 billion trips per year. Non-school transit buses give 5.2 billion trips annually. Around 440,000 yellow school buses carry over 24 million students to and from schools. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that forced busing of students may be ordered to achieve racial desegregation. This ruling resulted in a white flight from the inner cities which largely diluted the intent of the order. This flight had other, non-educational ramifications as well. Integration took place in most schools, though de facto segregation often determined the composition of the student body. By the 1990s, most areas of the country had been released from mandatory busing.

Children boarding a school bus in Thibodaux, Louisiana, 2006

School start times are computed with busing in mind. There are often three start times: for elementary, for middle and junior high school, and for high school. One school district computed its cost per bus (without the driver) at $20,575 annually. It assumed a model where the average driver drove 80 miles per day. A driver was presumed to cost $.62 per mile (1.6 km). Elementary schools started at 7:30 am, middle schools and junior high school started at 8:30, and high schools at 8:15. While elementary school started earlier, they also finish earlier, at 2:30 pm, middle schools at 3:30, and high schools at 3:20. All school districts establish their own times and means of transportation within guidelines set by their own states.

Grade placement

Schools use several methods to determine grade placement. One method involves placing students in a grade based on a child's birthday. Cut-off dates based on the child's birthday determine placement in either a higher or lower grade level. For example, if the school's cut-off date is September 1, and an incoming student's birthday is August 2, then this student would be placed in a higher grade level. If the student is in high school, this could mean that the student gets placed in 11th grade instead of 10th because of their birthday. The content each grade aligns with age and academic goals for the expected age of the students. Generally a student is expected to advance a grade each year K–12; however, if a student under-performs, they may retake that grade.

Primary education

Historically, in the United States, local public control (and private alternatives) have allowed for some variation in the organization of schools. Elementary school includes kindergarten through fifth grade or sixth grade (sometimes to fourth grade or eighth grade). Basic subjects are taught in elementary school, and students often remain in one classroom throughout the school day, except for specialized programs, such as physical education, library, music, and art classes. There are (as of 2001) about 3.6 million children in each grade in the United States.

A fifth-grade class in Paramus, New Jersey, c. 1957

Typically, the curriculum in public elementary education is determined by individual school districts or county school system. The school district selects curriculum guides and textbooks that reflect a state's learning standards and benchmarks for a given grade level. The most recent curriculum that has been adopted by most states is Common Core. Learning Standards are the goals by which states and school districts must meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) as mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This description of school governance is simplistic at best, however, and school systems vary widely not only in the way curricular decisions are made but also in how teaching and learning take place. Some states or school districts impose more top-down mandates than others. In others, teachers play a significant role in curriculum design and there are few top-down mandates. Curricular decisions within private schools are often made differently from in public schools, and in most cases without consideration of NCLB.

Public elementary school teachers typically instruct between twenty and thirty students. A typical classroom will include children with a range of learning needs or abilities, from those identified as having special needs of the kinds listed in the Individuals with Disabilities Act IDEA to those that are cognitively, athletically or artistically disabled. At times, an individual school district identifies areas of need within the curriculum. Teachers and advisory administrators form committees to develop supplemental materials to support learning for diverse learners and to identify enrichment for textbooks. There are special education teachers working with the identified students. Many school districts post information about the curriculum and supplemental materials on websites for public access.

In general, a student learns basic arithmetic and sometimes rudimentary algebra in mathematics, English proficiency (such as basic grammar, spelling, and vocabulary), and fundamentals of other subjects. Learning standards are identified for all areas of a curriculum by individual States, including those for mathematics, social studies, science, physical development, the fine arts, and reading. While the concept of State Learning standards has been around for some time, No Child Left Behind has mandated that standards exist at the State level.

Secondary education

A high-school senior (twelfth grade) classroom in Calhan, Colorado, 2008

Secondary education is often divided into two phases, middle/junior high school and high school. Students in secondary schools often move to different classrooms for different subjects, and some schools enable some choice regarding what courses the student takes, though these choices are limited by factors such as governmental curriculum requirements.

"Middle school" (or "junior high school") has a variable range between districts. It usually includes sixth, seventh, and eighth grades (or other times only seventh and eighth), occasionally also includes ninth, and very occasionally fifth grades as well. High school (occasionally senior high school) includes grades 9 through 12. Students in these grades are commonly referred to as freshmen (grade 9), sophomores (grade 10), juniors (grade 11), and seniors (grade 12). At the high school level, students generally take a broad variety of classes without specializing in any particular subject. Students are generally required to take a broad range of mandatory subjects, but may choose additional subjects ("electives") to fill out their required hours of learning. High school grades normally are included in a student's official transcript for purposes such as college applications. Official transcripts usually include the ninth grade, whether it is taught in a middle school or a high school.

Each state sets minimum requirements for how many years of various mandatory subjects are required; these requirements vary widely, but generally include 2–4 years of each of: Science, Mathematics, English, Social sciences, Physical education; some years of a foreign language and some form of art education are often also required, as is a health curriculum in which students learn about anatomy, nutrition, first aid, sexuality, drug awareness, and birth control.

High schools provide vocational education, Honors, Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses. These are special forms of honors classes where the curriculum is more challenging and lessons more aggressively paced than standard courses. Honors, AP or IB courses are usually taken during the 11th or 12th grade of high school, but may be taken as early as 9th grade. Some international schools offer international school leaving qualifications, to be studied for and awarded instead of or alongside of the high school diploma, Honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate. Regular honors courses are more intense and faster-paced than typical college preparatory courses. AP and IB are similar, but conform to a curriculum which can provide credit equivalent to college-level classes.

Tracking (streaming)

Tracking is the practice of dividing students at the primary or secondary school level into classes on the basis of ability or achievement. One common use is to offer different curricula for students preparing for college and for those preparing for direct entry into technical schools or the workplace.

Grading scale

In schools in the United States children are assessed throughout the school year by their teachers, and report cards are issued to parents at varying intervals. Generally, the scores for individual assignments and tests are recorded for each student in a grade book, along with the maximum number of points for each assignment. End-of-term or -year evaluations are most frequently given in the form of a letter grade on an A-F scale, whereby A is the best possible grade and F is a failing grade (most schools do not include the letter E in the assessment scale), or a numeric percentage. The Waldorf schools, most democratic schools, and some other private schools, give (often extensive) verbal characterizations of student progress rather than letter or number grades. Some school districts allow flexibility in grading scales at the Student information system level, allowing custom letters or symbols to be used (though transcripts must use traditional A-F letters)

Example grading scale
A B C D F
++ +
+
+
+

Extra Credit (If Applicable) 100.0 99.0–97.0 96.9–94.1 94.0–87.0 86.9–83.0 82.9–80.0 79.9–77.0 76.9–73.0 72.9–70.0 69.9–67.0 66.9–63.0 62.9–60.0 59.9–0.0

Traditionally, colleges and universities tend to take on the formal letter grading scale, consisting of A, B, C, D, and F, as a way to indicate student performance. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, most Colleges and Universities were flooded with petitions proposing pass or fail options for students considering the difficulties with transitioning and managing during a state of emergency. Although most colleges and universities empathized with students expressing their frustration with transitioning online, transfer students implementing the pass or fail option are forecasted to have to retake the class. College credits for pass or fail classes have a low rate of being accepted by other colleges, forcing transfer students to sit through and pay for the same class they have already completed. While some colleges, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie Mellon University, and North Carolina are permitting their students from weeks to months, to decide whether they will implement the pass or fail option offered by their college. While Harvard Medical School has previously been opposed to pass or fail grades, they have opened up to accepting pass grades.

Standardized testing

Under the No Child Left Behind Act and Every Student Succeeds Acts, all American states must test students in public schools statewide to ensure that they are achieving the desired level of minimum education, such as on the New York Regents Examinations, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) and the Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) or the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS); students being educated at home or in private schools are not included. The act also required that students and schools show adequate yearly progress. This means they must show some improvement each year. When a student fails to make adequate yearly progress, NCLB mandated that remediation through summer school or tutoring be made available to a student in need of extra help. On December 10, 2015, President Barack Obama signed legislation replacing NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). However, the enactment of ESSA did not eliminate provisions relating to the periodic standardized tests given to students.

Academic performance impacts the perception of a school's educational program. Rural schools fare better than their urban counterparts in two key areas: test scores and drop-out rate. First, students in small schools performed equal to or better than their larger school counterparts. In addition, on the 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress, 4th and 8th-grade students scored as well or better in reading, science, and mathematics.

During high school, students (usually in 11th grade) may take one or more standardized tests depending on their post-secondary education preferences and their local graduation requirements. In theory, these tests evaluate the overall level of knowledge and learning aptitude of the students. The SAT and ACT are the most common standardized tests that students take when applying to college. A student may take the SAT, ACT, both, or neither depending upon the post-secondary institutions the student plans to apply to for admission. Most competitive post-secondary institutions also require two or three SAT Subject Tests (formerly known as SAT IIs), which are shorter exams that focus strictly on a particular subject matter. However, all these tests serve little to no purpose for students who do not move on to post-secondary education, so they can usually be skipped without affecting one's ability to graduate.

Standardized testing has become increasingly controversial in recent years. Creativity and the need for applicable knowledge are becoming rapidly more valuable than simple memorization. Opponents of standardized education have stated that it is the system of standardized education itself that is to blame for employment issues and concerns over the questionable abilities of recent graduates.Others consider standardized tests to be a valuable objective check on grade inflation. In recent years, grade point averages (particularly in suburban schools) have been rising while SAT scores have been falling. The standardized test demonstrates a school's improvement on state assessment tests. However, it has been shown that this kind of testing does not improve students' "fluid intelligence". What standardized testing is actually testing is the ability to recall information quickly from short-term memory. They are not requiring students to use logical thinking, problem-solving, or long-term memory. Suggestions for improving standardized testing include evaluating a student's overall growth, possibly including non-cognitive qualities such as social and emotional behaviors, not just achievement; introducing 21st-century skills and values; and making the tests open-ended, authentic, and engaging.

Extracurricular activities

Examples of recreational fields, including a football field, in New York's Mineola High School.
 
The football team and marching band of Urbana High School, 2023. Both are examples of extracurricular activities in schools.

A major characteristic of American schools is the high priority given to sports, clubs, and activities by the community, the parents, the schools, and the students themselves. Extracurricular activities are educational activities not falling within the scope of the regular curriculum but under the supervision of the school. Extracurriculars at the high school age (15–18) can be anything that doesn't require a high school credit or paid employment, but simply done out of pleasure or to also look good on a college transcript. Extracurricular activities for all ages can be categorized under clubs, art, culture and language, community, leadership, government, media, military, music, performing arts, religion, role play/fantasy, speech, sports, technology, and volunteer, all of which take place outside of school hours. These sorts of activities are put in place as other forms of teamwork, time management, goal setting, self-discovery, building self-esteem, relationship building, finding interests, and academics. These extracurricular activities and clubs can be sponsored by fundraising, or by the donation of parents who give towards the program in order for it to keep running. Students and Parents are also obligated to spend money on whatever supplies are necessary for this activity that are not provided for the school (sporting equipment, sporting attire, costumes, food, instruments). These activities can extend to large amounts of time outside the normal school day; home-schooled students, however, are not normally allowed to participate. Student participation in sports programs, drill teams, bands, and spirit groups can amount to hours of practices and performances. Most states have organizations that develop rules for competition between groups. These organizations are usually forced to implement time limits on hours practiced as a prerequisite for participation. Many schools also have non-varsity sports teams; however, these are usually afforded fewer resources and less attention.

Sports programs and their related games, especially football and basketball, are major events for American students and for larger schools can be a major source of funds for school districts.

High school athletic competitions often generate intense interest in the community.

In addition to sports, numerous non-athletic extracurricular activities are available in American schools, both public and private. Activities include Quizbowl, musical groups, marching bands, student government, school newspapers, science fairs, debate teams, and clubs focused on an academic area (such as the Spanish Club), community service interests (such as Key Club), or professional networking (such as Future Business Leaders of America or TLEEM).

Compulsory education

Schooling is compulsory for all children in the United States, but the age range for which school attendance is required varies from state to state. Some states allow students to leave school between 14 and 17 with parental permission, before finishing high school; other states require students to stay in school until age 18. Children who do not comply with compulsory attendance laws without good cause are deemed to be truants, and they and their parents may be subject to various penalties under state law.

Around 523,000 students between the ages of 15 and 24 drop out of high school each year, a rate of 4.7 percent as of October 2017. In the United States, 75 percent of crimes are committed by high school dropouts. Around 60 percent of black dropouts end up spending time incarcerated. The incarceration rate for African-American male high school dropouts was about 50 times the national average as of 2010.

Additional support needs

Students with special needs are typically taught by teachers with specialized training in adapting curricula. As of 2017, about 13% of U.S. students receive special education services.

According to the National Association of School Nurses, 5% of students in 2009 have a seizure disorder, another 5% have ADHD and 10% have mental or emotional disorders.

On January 25, 2013, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance, clarifying school districts' existing legal obligations to give disabled students an equal chance to compete in extracurricular sports alongside their able-bodied classmates.

Educating children with disabilities

The federal law, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires states to ensure that all government-run schools provide services to meet the individual needs of students with special needs, as defined by the law. All students with special needs are entitled to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE).

Schools meet with the parents or guardians to develop an Individualized Education Program that determines best placement for the child. Students must be placed in the least restrictive environment (LRE) that is appropriate for the student's needs.

In 2017, nationwide 67.1% of students with disabilities attending public schools graduated high school.

Criticism

At-risk students (those with educational needs that are not associated with a disability) are often placed in classes with students with minor emotional and social disabilities. Critics assert that placing at-risk students in the same classes as these disabled students may impede the educational progress of both the at-risk and the disabled students. Some research has refuted this assertion, and has suggested this approach increases the academic and behavioral skills of the entire student population.

Public and private schools

In the United States, state and local governments have primary responsibility for education. The Federal Department of Education plays a role in standards-setting and education finance, and some primary and secondary schools, for the children of military employees, are run by the Department of Defense.

K–12 students in most areas have a choice between free tax-funded public schools, or privately funded private schools.

According to government data, one-tenth of students are enrolled in private schools. Approximately 85% of students enter the public schools, largely because they are tax-subsidized (tax burdens by school districts vary from area to area). School districts are usually separate from other local jurisdictions, with independent officials and budgets.

There are more than 14,000 school districts in the country, and more than $500 billion is spent each year on public primary and secondary education. States do not require reporting from their school districts to allow an analysis of efficiency of return on investment. The Center for American Progress commends Florida and Texas as the only two states that provide annual school-level productivity evaluations which report to the public how well school funds are being spent at the local level. This allows for a comparison of school districts within a state.

Public school systems are supported by a combination of local, state, and federal government funding. Because a large portion of school revenues come from local property taxes, public schools vary widely in the resources they have available per student. Class size also varies from one district to another. Curriculum decisions in public schools are made largely at the local and state levels; the federal government has limited influence. In most districts, a locally elected school board runs schools. The school board appoints an official called the superintendent of schools to manage the schools in the district.

Local property taxes for public school funding may have disadvantages depending on how wealthy or poor these cities may be. Some of the disadvantages may be not having the proper electives of students' interest or advanced placement courses to further the knowledge and education of these students. Cases such as these limit students and causes inequality in education because there is no easy way to gain access to those courses since the education system might not view them as necessary. The public education system does provide the classes needed to obtain a GED (General Education Development) and obtain a job or pursue higher education.

The largest public school system in the United States is in New York City, where more than one million students are taught in 1,200 separate public schools.

Admission to individual public schools is usually based on residency. To compensate for differences in school quality based on geography, school systems serving large cities and portions of large cities often have magnet schools that provide enrollment to a specified number of non-resident students in addition to serving all resident students. This special enrollment is usually decided by lottery with equal numbers of males and females chosen. Some magnet schools cater to gifted students or to students with special interests, such as the sciences or performing arts.

Phillips Academy Andover, an elite private secondary school in Massachusetts

Private schools in the United States include parochial schools (affiliated with religious denominations), non-profit independent schools, and for-profit private schools. Private schools charge varying rates depending on geographic location, the school's expenses, and the availability of funding from sources, other than tuition. For example, some churches partially subsidize private schools for their members. Some people have argued that when their child attends a private school, they should be able to take the funds that the public school no longer needs and apply that money towards private school tuition in the form of vouchers. This is the basis of the school choice movement.

5,072,451 students attended 33,740 private elementary and secondary schools in 2007. 74.5% of these were Caucasian non-Hispanic, 9.8% were African American, 9.6% were Hispanic, 5.4% were Asian or Pacific Islander, and .6% were American Indian. Average school size was 150.3 students. There were 456,266 teachers. The number of students per teacher was about 11. 65% of seniors in private schools in 2006–07 went on to attend a four-year college.

Private schools have various missions: some cater to college-bound students seeking a competitive edge in the college admissions process; others are for gifted students, students with learning disabilities or other special needs, or students with specific religious affiliations. Some cater to families seeking a small school, with a nurturing, supportive environment. Unlike public school systems, private schools have no legal obligation to accept any interested student. Admission to some private schools is often highly selective.

An August 17, 2000 article by the Chicago Sun-Times refers to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago Office of Catholic Schools as the largest private school system in the United States.

Teachers

Most states require that their school districts within the state teach for 180 days a year. Teachers worked from 35 to 46 hours a week, in a survey taken in 1993. In 2011, American teachers worked 1,097 hours in the classroom, the most of any industrialized nation measured by the OECD. They spent 1,913 hours a year on their work, just below the national average of 1,932 hours for all workers. In 2011, the average annual salary of a PreK–12 teacher was $55,040.

Charter schools

The charter school movement began in 1990 and has spread rapidly in the United States, members, parents, teachers, and students to allow for the "expression of diverse teaching philosophies and cultural and social life styles."

Homeschooling

In 2014, approximately 1.5 million children were homeschooled, up 84% from 1999 when the U.S. Department of Education first started keeping statistics. This was 2.9% of all children.

As of spring 2016, there are 2.3 million homeschooled students in the United States. It is appearing that homeschooling is a continuing trend in the U.S. with a 2 percent to 8 percent per annum over the past few years Many select moral or religious reasons for homeschooling their children. The second main category is unschooling, those who prefer a non-standard approach to education. This is a parent-led type of schooling that takes place at home and is now boarding a mainstream form of education in the United States. The Demography for homeschoolers has a variety of people; these are atheists, Christians, and Mormons; conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; low-, middle-, and high-income families; black, Hispanic, and white; parents with PhDs, GEDs, and no high-school diplomas. One study shows that 32 percent of homeschool students are Black, Asian, Hispanic, and others (i.e., not White/non-Hispanic). There is no required taxes on this form of education and most homeschooled families spend an average of $600 per student for their education.

Opposition to homeschooling comes from varied sources, including teachers' organizations and school districts. The National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States, has been particularly vocal in the past. Opponents' stated concerns fall into several broad categories, including fears of poor academic quality, and lack of socialization with others. At this time, over half of states have oversight into monitoring or measuring the academic progress of home schooled students, with all but ten requiring some form of notification to the state.

Ideas and delusions of reference

Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the phenomenon of an individual experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance. It is "the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny", usually in a negative and hostile manner.

In psychiatry, delusions of reference form part of the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses such as schizophreniadelusional disorder, and bipolar disorder with mania, as well as for schizotypal personality disorder. To a lesser extent, their presence can be a hallmark of paranoid personality disorder, as well as body dysmorphic disorder. They can be found in autism during periods of intense stress. They can also be caused by intoxication, such as from stimulants like methamphetamine. Psychedelics like psilocybin have also been reported to produce ideas of reference during experiences.

Psychoanalytic views

In Sigmund Freud's view, "Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis...voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the [paranoid] disease, and so the evolution of conscience is reproduced regressively." As early as 1928, Freud's contemporary, Carl Jung, introduced the concept of synchronicity, a theory of "meaningful coincidences".

In 1946, Otto Fenichel concluded that "the projection of the superego is most clearly seen in ideas of reference and of being influenced....Delusions of this kind merely bring to the patient from the outside what his self-observing and self-critical conscience actually tells him."

Jacques Lacan similarly saw ideas of reference as linked to "the unbalancing of the relation to the capital Other and the radical anomaly that it involves, qualified, improperly, but not without some approximation to the truth, in old clinical medicine, as partial delusion"—the "big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words", in short, the realm of the superego.

Anti-psychiatry

Validation rather than clinical condemnation of ideas of reference is frequently expressed by anti-psychiatrists, on the grounds, for example, that "the patient's ideas of reference and influence and delusions of persecution were merely descriptions of her parents' behavior toward her." While accepting that "there is certainly confusion between persecutory fantasies and persecutory realities", figures like David Cooper believe that "ideas of connection with apparently remote people, or ideas of being influenced by others equally remote, are in fact stating their experience" of social influence – albeit in a distorted form by "including in their network of influence institutions as absurd as Scotland Yard, the Queen of England, the President of the United States, or the BBC".

R. D. Laing took a similar view of the person who was "saying that his brains have been taken from him, that his actions are controlled from outer space, etc. "Such delusions are partially achieved derealization-realizations." Laing also considered how "in typical paranoid ideas of reference, the person feels that the murmurings and mutterings he hears as he walks past a street crowd are about him. In a bar, a burst of laughter behind his back is at some joke cracked about him", but felt that deeper acquaintance with the patient reveals in fact that "what tortures him is not so much his delusions of reference, but his harrowing suspicion that he is of no importance to anyone, that no one is referring to him at all."

Delusions of reference

Ideas of reference must be distinguished from delusions of reference, which may be similar in content but are held with greater conviction. With the former, but not the latter, the person holding them may have "the feeling that strangers are talking about him/her, but if challenged, acknowledges that the people may be talking about something else".

From the psychoanalytic view, there may be at the same time "transitions...to delusions" from ideas of reference: "abortive ideas of reference, in the beginning of their development or, in schizotypal personalities, continuously, may remain subject to the patient's criticism...under adverse circumstances, by minimal economic shifts, however, reality testing may be lost and daydreams of this kind turn into delusions."

It has been noted that a person "rigidly controlled by his superego...readily forms sensitive ideas of reference. A key experience may occur in his life circumstances and quite suddenly these ideas become structured as delusions of reference." Within the "focus of paranoia...that man crossing his legs, that woman wearing that blouse—it can't just be accidental. It has a particular meaning, is intended to convey something."

Examples

Persons with ideas of reference may experience:

  • Believing that "somehow everyone on a passing city bus is talking about them".
  • Feeling that people on television or radio are either talking about them or talking directly to them.
  • Believing that headlines or articles in newspapers have been written exclusively for them.
  • Believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately contrived for them, or have special personal significance for them.
  • Believing that the lyrics of a song are specifically about them.
  • Believing that the normal function of cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices is to send secret and significant messages that only they can understand or believe.
  • Perceiving objects or events as having been deliberately set up to convey a particular meaning to themselves.
  • Thinking "that the slightest careless movement on the part of another person had great personal meaning...increased significance".
  • Thinking that posts on social networking websites or Internet blogs have hidden meanings pertaining to them.
  • Believing that the behavior of others is in reference to an abnormal, offensive body odor, which in reality is non-existent and cannot be smelled or detected by others (see: olfactory reference syndrome).

Literary analogues

  • In Mrs Dalloway (1925), as a plane flies over a shell-shocked soldier: "So, thought Septimus, they are signalling to me...smoke words". The author, Virginia Woolf, recorded in a memoir how she herself "had lain in bed...thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson's azaleas".
  • In Margaret Mahy's Memory (1987), the confused adolescent hero decides "to abandon himself to the magic of chance. From now on his signposts would be words overheard accidentally, graffiti, advertisements, street names...the clues the city offered him."
  • The Naval Intelligence hero of Patrick O'Brian's Treason's Harbour (1983) reflects ruefully that "after a while an intelligence-agent tended to see spies everywhere, rather as certain lunatics saw references to themselves in every newspaper."
  • In Vladimir Nabokov's short story "Signs and Symbols" (1948), the parents of a suicidal youth suffering from a variation of this illness, "referential mania", decide to remove him from a hospital in order to keep a more watchful eye.
  • Fahrenheit 451

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Fahrenheit 451
    This original cover shows a drawing of a man, who appears to be made of newspaper and is engulfed in flames, standing on top of some books. His right arm is down and holding what appears to be a fireman's hat made of paper while his left arm is as if wiping sweat from the brow of his bowed head. The title and author's name appear in large text over the images and there is a small caption in the upper left-hand corner that reads, "Wonderful stories by the author of The Golden Apples of the Sun".
    First edition cover (clothbound)

    AuthorRay Bradbury
    IllustratorJoseph Mugnaini
    LanguageEnglish
    GenreDystopian
    Published1953-10-19 (Ballantine Books)
    Publication placeUnited States
    Pages156
    ISBN978-0-7432-4722-1 (current cover edition)
    OCLC53101079
    813.54 22
    LC ClassPS3503.R167 F3 2003

    Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. It presents a future American society where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy Montag, a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.

    Fahrenheit 451 was written by Bradbury during the Second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and by ideological repression in the Soviet Union. Bradbury's claimed motivation for writing the novel has changed multiple times. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote the book because of his concerns about the threat of burning books in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. In a 1994 interview, Bradbury cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it "the real enemy these days" and labeling it as "thought control and freedom of speech control".

    The writing and theme within Fahrenheit 451 was explored by Bradbury in some of his previous short stories. Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote "Bright Phoenix", a short story about a librarian who confronts a "Chief Censor", who burns books. An encounter Bradbury had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story "The Pedestrian" in 1951. In "The Pedestrian", a man going for a nighttime walk in his neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police. In the society of "The Pedestrian", citizens are expected to watch television as a leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451. Elements of both "Bright Phoenix" and "The Pedestrian" would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel. Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and the novel was published later that year.

    Upon its release, Fahrenheit 451 was a critical success, albeit with notable dissenters; the novel's subject matter led to its censorship in apartheid South Africa and various schools in the United States. In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. It later won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984 and a "Retro" Hugo Award in 2004. Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version. The novel has been adapted into films, stage plays, and video games. Film adaptations of the novel include a 1966 film directed by François Truffaut starring Oskar Werner as Guy Montag and a 2018 television film directed by Ramin Bahrani starring Michael B. Jordan as Montag, both of which received a mixed critical reception. Bradbury himself published a stage play version in 1979 and helped develop a 1984 interactive fiction video game of the same name, as well as a collection of his short stories titled A Pleasure to Burn. Two BBC Radio dramatizations were also produced.

    Historical and biographical context

    The Nazi book burnings horrified Ray Bradbury and inspired him to write Fahrenheit 451

    The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and organizations suspected of having communist ties, held hearings in 1947 to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making. The government's interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury; he was concerned about the workings of his government, and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would inspire Bradbury to write "The Pedestrian", a short story which would go on to become "The Fireman" and then Fahrenheit 451. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's McCarthyism persecution of accused communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury's contempt for government overreach.

    The Golden Age of Radio occurred between the early 1920s to the late 1950s, during Bradbury's early life, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books, indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a distraction from important affairs. This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.

    Bradbury's lifelong passion for books began at an early age. After he graduated from high school, his family could not afford for him to attend college, so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public Library where he educated himself. As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough. Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a great impression was made on Bradbury about the vulnerability of books to censure and destruction.

    Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book burnings stating, "When I was fifteen years old, Hitler burned books in the streets of Berlin. And it terrified me". Bradbury was also influenced by Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression, the Great Purge, in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed, stating, "They burned the authors instead of the books."

    Plot summary

    "The Hearth and the Salamander"

    In a distant future, Guy Montag is a fireman employed to burn outlawed books, along with the houses they are hidden in. One fall night while returning from work, he meets his new neighbor Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit cause him to question his life and perceived happiness. Montag returns home to find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills, and he calls for medical attention. Two EMTs pump her stomach and change her blood. After they leave to rescue another overdose victim, Montag overhears Clarisse and her family talking about their illiterate society. Shortly afterward, Montag's mind is bombarded with Clarisse's subversive thoughts and the memory of Mildred's near-death. Over the next few days, Clarisse meets Montag each night as he walks home. Clarisse's simple pleasures and interests make her an outcast among her peers, and she is forced to go to therapy for her behavior. Montag looks forward to the meetings, but one day, Clarisse goes missing.

    In the following days, while he and other firemen are ransacking the book-filled house of an old woman and drenching it in kerosene, Montag steals a book. The woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to light a match and burn herself alive. Jarred by the suicide, Montag returns home and hides the book under his pillow. Montag asks Mildred if she has heard anything about Clarisse. She reveals that Clarisse's family moved away after Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and died four days ago. Dismayed by her failure to mention this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep. Outside he suspects the presence of "The Mechanical Hound", an eight-legged robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.

    Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls. Montag suggests he should take a break from being a fireman, and Mildred panics over the thought of losing the house and her parlor wall "family". Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, visits Montag to see how he is doing. Sensing his concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how books had lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over decades, people began to embrace new media (like film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life. Books were abridged or degraded to accommodate shorter attention spans. At the same time, advances in technology resulted in nearly all buildings being made with fireproof materials, and firemen preventing fires were no longer necessary. The government then instead turned the firemen into officers of society's peace of mind: instead of putting out fires, they were charged with starting them, specifically to burn books, which were condemned as sources of confusing and depressing thoughts that complicated people's lives. After an awkward exchange between Mildred and Montag over the book hidden under his pillow, Beatty becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat before leaving; he says that if a fireman had a book, he would be asked to burn it within the following twenty-four hours. If he refused, the other firemen would come and burn it for him. The encounter leaves Montag shaken.

    Montag reveals to Mildred that, over the last year, he has accumulated books that are hidden in their ceiling. In a panic, Mildred grabs a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator, but Montag subdues her and says they are going to read the books to see if they have value. If they do not, he promises the books will be burned and their lives will return to normal.

    "The Sieve and the Sand"

    Mildred refuses to go along with Montag's plan, questioning why she or anyone else should care about books. Montag goes on a rant about Mildred's suicide attempt, Clarisse's disappearance and death, the woman who burned herself, and the imminent war that goes ignored by the masses. He suggests that perhaps the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. Mildred remains unconvinced.

    Conceding that Mildred is a lost cause, Montag needs help to understand the books. He remembers an old man named Faber, an English professor before books were banned, whom he once met in a park. Montag visits Faber's home carrying a copy of the Bible, the book he stole at the woman's house. Once there, after multiple attempts to ask, Montag forces the scared and reluctant Faber into helping him by methodically ripping pages from the Bible. Faber concedes and gives Montag a homemade earpiece communicator so that he can offer constant guidance.

    At home, Mildred's friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive to watch the "parlor walls". Not interested in this entertainment, Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women in meaningful conversation, only for them to reveal just how indifferent, ignorant, and callous they truly are. Enraged, Montag shows them a book of poetry. This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely. Mildred tries to dismiss Montag's actions as a tradition firemen act out once a year: they find an old book and read it as a way to make fun of how silly the past is. Montag proceeds to recite a poem, causing Mrs. Phelps to cry. The two women leave.

    Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the firehouse late at night. There, Montag hands Beatty a book to cover for the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before, which is tossed into the trash. Beatty reveals that, despite his disillusionment, he was once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm sounds and Beatty picks up the address from the dispatcher system. They drive in the fire truck to the unexpected destination: Montag's house.

    "Burning Bright"

    Beatty orders Montag to destroy his house with a flamethrower, rather than the more powerful "salamander" that is usually used by the fire team, and tells him that his wife and her friends reported him. Montag watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too traumatized about losing her parlor wall "family" to even acknowledge her husband's existence or the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi. Montag complies, destroying the home piece by piece, but Beatty discovers his earpiece and plans to hunt down Faber. Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts him, Montag burns Beatty alive. As Montag tries to escape the scene, the Mechanical Hound attacks him, managing to inject his leg with an anesthetic. He destroys the Hound with the flamethrower and limps away. While escaping, Montag concludes that Beatty wanted to die a long time ago, having goaded him and provided him with a weapon.

    Montag runs towards Faber's house. En route, he crosses a road as a car attempts to run him over, but he manages to evade the vehicle, almost suffering the same fate as Clarisse and losing his knee. Faber urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact a group of exiled book-lovers who live there. Faber plans to leave on a bus heading to St. Louis, Missouri, where he and Montag can rendezvous later. Meanwhile, another Mechanical Hound is released to track down and kill Montag, with news helicopters following it to create a public spectacle. After wiping his scent from around the house in hopes of thwarting the Hound, Montag leaves. He escapes the manhunt by wading into a river and floating downstream, where he meets the book-lovers. They predicted Montag's arrival while watching the TV.

    The drifters are all former intellectuals. They have each memorized books should the day arrive that society comes to an end, with the survivors learning to embrace the literature of the past. Wanting to contribute to the group, Montag finds that he partially memorized the Book of Ecclesiastes, discovering that the group has a special way of unlocking photographic memory. While discussing their learnings, Montag and the group watch helplessly as bombers fly overhead and annihilate the city with nuclear weapons: the war has begun and ended in the same night. While Faber would have left on the early bus, everyone else (possibly including Mildred) is killed. Injured and dirtied, Montag and the group manage to survive the shockwave.

    When the war is over, the exiles return to the city to rebuild society.

    Characters

    • Guy Montag is the protagonist and a fireman who presents the dystopian world in which he lives first through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, then as a man in conflict about it, and eventually as someone resolved to be free of it. Throughout most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes only what he hears. Clarisse McClellan inspires Montag's change, even though they do not know each other for very long.
    • Clarisse McClellan is a teenage girl one month short of her 17th birthday who is Montag's neighbor. She walks with Montag on his trips home from work. A modern critic has described her as an example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as Clarisse is an unusual sort of person compared to the others inhabiting the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. A few days after her first meeting with Montag, she disappears without any explanation; Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and that her family moved away following her death. It is implied that Beatty may have assassinated Clarisse. In the afterword of a later edition, Bradbury notes that the 1966 film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old schoolteacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
    • Mildred "Millie" Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (large, flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the oppressive society around her. She is described in the book as "thin as a praying mantis from dieting, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, and her flesh like white bacon." Despite her husband's attempts to break her from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach, and finding herself unable to live with someone who has been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and abandoning him, and presumably dies when the city is bombed.
    • Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the book's main antagonist. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and opinions. After he forces Montag to burn his own house, Montag kills him with a flamethrower. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
    • Stoneman and Black are Montag's coworkers at the firehouse. They do not have a large impact on the story and function only to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who obediently do as they are told and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in his job but subsequently realizes how damaging it is to society. Black is later framed by Montag for possessing books.
    • Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance meeting in a park sometime earlier. Faber at first refuses to help Montag and later realizes Montag is only trying to learn about books, not destroy them. He secretly communicates with Montag through an electronic earpiece and helps Montag escape the city, then gets on a bus to St. Louis and escapes the city himself before it is bombed. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell; it is also the name of a publishing company, Faber and Faber.
    • Mrs. Ann Bowles and Mrs. Clara Phelps are Mildred's friends and representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic mainstream society presented in the novel. During a social visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps' husband Pete was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he will be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a three-times-married single mother. Her first husband divorced her, her second died in a jet accident, and her third committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. She has two children who do not like or respect her due to her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting; Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up, and she's glad she can hit back. When Montag reads Dover Beach to them, he strikes a chord in Mrs. Phelps, who starts crying over how hollow her life is. Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading "silly awful hurting words".
    • Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.

    Title

    The title page of the book explains the title as follows: Fahrenheit 451—The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.... On inquiring about the temperature at which paper would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 °F (233 °C) was the autoignition temperature of paper. In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature at a range of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F (218 and 246 °C), depending on the type of paper.

    Writing and development

    Fahrenheit 451 developed out of a series of ideas Bradbury had visited in previously written stories. For many years, he tended to single out "The Pedestrian" in interviews and lectures as sort of a proto-Fahrenheit 451. In the preface of his 2006 anthology Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 he states that this is an oversimplification. The full genealogy of Fahrenheit 451 given in Match to Flame is involved. The following covers the most salient aspects.

    Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote the short story "Bright Phoenix" (not published until the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) about a librarian who confronts a book-burning "Chief Censor" named Jonathan Barnes.

    In late 1949, Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night. When asked "What are you doing?", Bradbury wisecracked, "Putting one foot in front of another". This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story "The Pedestrian".

    In "The Pedestrian", Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the city's only remotely operated police cruiser for taking nighttime walks, something that has become extremely rare in this future-based setting, as everybody else stays inside and watches television ("viewing screens"). Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies" for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 echoed this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.

    Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of "Bright Phoenix" and the totalitarian future of "The Pedestrian" into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. "The Fireman" was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour. The first draft was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.

    Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books to double the length of his story to make a novel, Bradbury returned to the same typing room and made the story 25,000 words longer, again taking nine days. The title "Fahrenheit 451" came to him on January 22. The final manuscript was ready in mid-August, 1953. The resulting novel, which some considered as a fix-up (despite being an expanded rewrite of one single novella), was published by Ballantine in 1953.

    Supplementary material

    Bradbury has supplemented the novel with various front and back matter, including a 1979 coda, a 1982 afterword, a 1993 foreword, and several introductions.

    Publication history

    The first U.S. printing was a paperback version from October 1953 by The Ballantine Publishing Group. Shortly after the paperback, a hardback version was released that included a special edition of 200 signed and numbered copies bound in asbestos. These were technically collections because the novel was published with two short stories, "The Playground" and "And the Rock Cried Out", which have been omitted from later printings. A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of nascent Playboy magazine.

    Expurgation

    Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine Books, with the release of the "Bal-Hi Edition" aimed at high school students. Among the changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words "hell", "damn", and "abortion"; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two incidents.

    In the first incident, a drunk man is changed to a "sick man", while the second involves cleaning fluff out of a human navel, which instead becomes "cleaning ears" in the other. For a while, both the censored and uncensored versions were available concurrently, but by 1973, Ballantine was publishing only the censored version. That continued until 1979, when it came to Bradbury's attention:

    In 1979, one of Bradbury's friends showed him an expurgated copy of the book. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original version once again became available. In this reinstated work, in the Author's Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author's work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript "mutilation".

    The "Bal-Hi" editions are now referred to by the publisher as the "Revised Bal-Hi" editions.

    Non-print publications

    An audiobook version read by Bradbury himself was released in 1976 and received a Spoken Word Grammy nomination. Another audiobook was released in 2005 narrated by Christopher Hurt. The e-book version was released in December 2011.

    Reception

    In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel "among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more." The Chicago Sunday Tribune's August Derleth described the book as "a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one possible future way of life", calling it "compelling" and praising Bradbury for his "brilliant imagination". Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, "upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary." Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government censorship.

    When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being "simply padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, ... often with coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance [but] too often merely with words." Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller characterized the title piece as "one of Bradbury's bitter, almost hysterical diatribes," while praising its "emotional drive and compelling, nagging detail." Similarly, The New York Times was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of developing a "virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture, namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man's existence."

    Fahrenheit 451 was number seven on the list of "Top Check Outs OF ALL TIME" by the New York Public Library

    Censorship/banning incidents

    In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools at the behest of parents or teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the inherent irony in such censorship. Notable incidents include:

    • In Apartheid South Africa, the book was burned along with thousands of banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.
    • In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida, under superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier classification system. Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom for "a lot of vulgarity". After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and approved all the currently used books.
    • In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all "obscene" words blacked out. Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.
    • In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list. Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.

      Themes

    Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said

    I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.

    As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief motivating factor for writing the story. Instead he usually claimed that the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the dangers of an illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of minority and special interest groups to books. In the late 1950s, Bradbury recounted

    In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

    This story echoes Mildred's "Seashell ear-thimbles" (i.e., a brand of in-ear headphones) that act as an emotional barrier between her and Montag. In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that people misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media like television marginalizes the reading of literature. Regarding minorities, he wrote in his 1979 Coda

    'There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. [...] Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever. [...] Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

    Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of these two primary factors; this is consistent with Captain Beatty's speech to Montag about the history of the firemen. According to Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit's censorship is not the result of an authoritarian program to retain power, but the result of a fragmented society seeking to accommodate its challenges by deploying the power of entertainment and technology. As Captain Beatty explains (p. 55)

    ...The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean."[...] "It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

    A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have been suggested. Two major themes are resistance to conformity and control of individuals via technology and mass media. Bradbury explores how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and suppress individualism through book burning. The characters Beatty and Faber point out that the American population is to blame. Due to their constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be suppressed. Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber went further to state that, rather than the government banning books, the American population simply stopped reading on their own. He notes that the book burnings themselves became a form of entertainment for the general public.

    In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."

    Predictions for the future

    Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unspecified city and time, though it is written as if set in a distant future. The earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than the year 2022 due to a reference to an atomic war taking place during that year.

    Bradbury described himself as "a preventer of futures, not a predictor of them." He did not believe that book burning was an inevitable part of the future; he wanted to warn against its development. In a later interview, when asked if he believes that teaching Fahrenheit 451 in schools will prevent his totalitarian vision of the future, Bradbury replied in the negative. Rather, he states that education must be at the kindergarten and first-grade level. If students are unable to read then, they will be unable to read Fahrenheit 451.

    As to technology, Sam Weller notes that Bradbury "predicted everything from flat-panel televisions to earbud headphones and twenty-four-hour banking machines."

    Adaptations

    Television

    Playhouse 90 broadcast "A Sound of Different Drummers" on CBS in 1957, written by Robert Alan Aurthur. The play combined plot ideas from Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bradbury sued and eventually won on appeal.

    Film

    A film adaptation written and directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie was released in 1966.[91]

    A film adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani and starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, and Lilly Singh was released in 2018 for HBO.

    Theater

    Mageina Tovah, Ray Bradbury, David Mauer (Montag), Jessica D. Stone (Clarisse), Michael Prichard (Captain Beatty) and Roses Prichard backstage of Fahrenheit 451 by the Pandemonium Theatre Company at the Fremont Centre Theatre, Pasadena, California in August 2008

    In the late 1970s Bradbury adapted his book into a play. At least part of it was performed at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles in 1979, but it was not in print until 1986 and the official world premiere was only in November 1988 by the Fort Wayne, Indiana Civic Theatre. The stage adaptation diverges considerably from the book and seems influenced by Truffaut's movie. For example, fire chief Beatty's character is fleshed out and is the wordiest role in the play. As in the movie, Clarisse does not simply disappear but in the finale meets up with Montag as a book character (she as Robert Louis Stevenson, he as Edgar Allan Poe).

    The UK premiere of Bradbury's stage adaptation was not until 2003 in Nottingham, while it took until 2006 before the Godlight Theatre Company produced and performed its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters. After the completion of the New York run, the production then transferred to the Edinburgh Festival where it was a 2006 Edinburgh Festival Pick of the Fringe.

    The Off-Broadway theatre The American Place Theatre presented a one man show adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 as a part of their 2008–2009 Literature to Life season.

    Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company staged a production at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena from April through December 2008, which was led by resident director Alan Neal Hubbs, produced by Bradbury and Racquel Lehrman, and starred David Polcyn (alternated with David Mauer and Lee Holmes) as Montag, Mageina Tovah alternating with Tanya Mounsey as Montag's wife, Jessica D. Stone as Clarisse, and Michael Prichard as Captain Beatty. The play was extended multiple times during its run for its reported popularity with audiences.

    Fahrenheit 451 inspired the Birmingham Repertory Theatre production Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine, which was performed at the Birmingham Central Library in April 2012.

    Radio

    In 1982, Gregory Evans' radio dramatization of the novel was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 starring Michael Pennington as Montag. It was broadcast eight more times on BBC Radio 4 Extra, twice each in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015.

    BBC Radio's second dramatization, by David Calcutt, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2003, starring Stephen Tomlin in the same role.

    Music

    In 1984 the new wave band Scortilla released the song Fahrenheit 451 inspired by the book by R. Bradbury and the film by F. Truffaut.

    In 2025, one composition on the instrumental concept album The Ray Bradbury Chronicles was based on the book, with three sections (City, Escape, Exile) inspired by the key stages of the novel's plotline.

    Computer games

    In 1984, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventure game of the same name by the software company Trillium, serving as a sequel to the events of the novel, and co-written by Len Neufeld and Bradbury himself.

    Comics

    In June 2009, a graphic novel edition of the book was published. Entitled Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, the paperback graphic adaptation was illustrated by Tim Hamilton. The introduction in the novel is written by Bradbury himself.

    Cultural references

    A protester against the Bhagavad Gita trial in Russia showing a quote from the novel: "– Do you ever read any of the books you burn? – That's against the law".

    Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 refers to Bradbury's novel and the September 11 attacks, emphasized by the film's tagline "The temperature where freedom burns". The film takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and its coverage in the news media, and became the highest grossing documentary of all time. Bradbury was upset by what he considered the appropriation of his title, and wanted the film renamed. He really didn't want to be associated in any way. Moore filmed a subsequent documentary about the 2016 election of Donald Trump called Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018, but compared to the earlier documentary, there was a complete shift in interest by the general audience.

    In 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved the publication of An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles, now RFC 7725, which specifies that websites forced to block resources for legal reasons should return a status code of 451 when users request those resources.

    Guy Montag (as Gui Montag) is used in the 1998 real-time strategy game StarCraft as a terran firebat hero.

    The numbers "451", and sometimes "0451", are often included as the first security code a player encounters in immersive sim video games as a reference to the System Shock series of games which first included the code as their own reference to Bradbury's novel.

    K–12 education in the United States

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