Beam-powered propulsion, also known as directed energy propulsion, is a class of aircraft or spacecraft propulsion that uses energy beamed to the spacecraft from a remote power plant to provide energy. The beam is typically either a microwave or a laser beam, and it is either pulsed or continuous. A continuous beam lends itself to thermal rockets, photonic thrusters, and light sails. In contrast, a pulsed beam lends itself to ablative thrusters and pulse detonation engines.
The rule of thumb that is usually quoted is that it takes a megawatt of power beamed to a vehicle per kg of payload while it is being accelerated to permit it to reach low Earth orbit.
More speculative designs, using mass ("micro-pellet") beams,
would allow for reaching the edge of the solar gravity lens, or even
nearby stars, in decades.
Other than launching to orbit, applications for moving around the world quickly have also been proposed.
Background
Rockets are momentum
machines; they use mass ejected from the rocket to provide momentum to
the rocket. Momentum is the product of mass and velocity, so rockets
generally attempt to put as much velocity into their working mass as possible, thereby minimizing the needed working mass. To accelerate the working mass, energy
is required. In a conventional rocket, the fuel is chemically combined
to provide the energy, and the resulting fuel products, the ash or
exhaust, are used as the working mass.
There is no particular reason why the same fuel has to be used for both energy and momentum. In the jet engine,
for instance, the fuel is used only to produce energy, and the air
provides the working mass the jet aircraft flies through. In modern jet
engines, the amount of air propelled is much more significant than the
amount used for energy. However, this is not a solution for the rockets
as they quickly climb to altitudes where the air is too thin to be
useful as a source of working mass.
Rockets can carry their working mass and use other energy sources. The problem is finding an energy source with a power-to-weight ratio that competes with chemical fuels. Small nuclear reactors can compete in this regard, and considerable work on nuclear thermal propulsion was carried out in the 1960s, but environmental concerns and rising costs led to the ending of most of these programs.
Further improvement can be made by removing the energy created by
the spacecraft. If the nuclear reactor is left on the ground and its
energy is transmitted to the spacecraft, its weight is also removed. The
issue then is getting the energy into the spacecraft. This is the idea
behind beamed power.
With beamed propulsion, one can leave the power source stationary on the ground and directly (or via a heat exchanger) heat propellant on the spacecraft with a maser
or a laser beam from a fixed installation. This permits the spacecraft
to leave its power source at home, saving significant amounts of mass
and greatly improving performance.
Since a laser can heat propellant to extremely high temperatures,
this potentially greatly improves the efficiency of a rocket, as exhaust
velocity is proportional to the square root of the temperature. Normal chemical rockets
have an exhaust speed limited by the fixed amount of energy in the
propellants, but beamed propulsion systems have no particular
theoretical limit (although, in practice, there are temperature limits).
Microwave propulsion
In
microwave thermal propulsion, an external microwave beam is used to
heat a refractory heat exchanger to >1,500 K, heating a propellant
such as hydrogen, methane, or ammonia. This improves the propulsion
system's specific impulse and thrust/weight ratio relative to
conventional rocket propulsion. For example, hydrogen can provide a
specific impulse of 700–900 seconds and a thrust/weight ratio of 50-150.
A variation, developed by brothers James Benford and Gregory Benford, is to use thermal desorption of propellant trapped in the material of a massive microwave sail. This produces a very high acceleration compared to microwave-pushed sails alone.
Electric propulsion
Some proposed spacecraft propulsion mechanisms use electrically powered spacecraft propulsion, in which electrical energy is used by an electrically powered rocket engine, such as an ion thruster or plasma propulsion engine. Usually, these schemes assume either solar panels or an onboard reactor. However, both power sources are heavy.
Beamed propulsion in the form of a laser can send power to a photovoltaic panel for Laser electric propulsion.
In this system, if a high intensity is incident on the solar array,
careful design of the panels is necessary to avoid a fall-off in
conversion efficiency due to heating effects. John Brophy has analyzed
the transmission of laser power to a photovoltaic array powering a
high-efficiency electric propulsion system as a means of accomplishing
high delta-V missions such as an interstellar precursor mission in a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts project.
A microwave beam could be used to send power to a rectenna for microwave electric propulsion. Microwave
broadcast power has been practically demonstrated several times (e.g.,
in Goldstone, California, in 1974). Rectennas are potentially
lightweight and can handle high power at high conversion efficiency.
However, rectennas must be huge for a significant amount of power to be
captured.
Direct impulse
A beam could also provide impulse by directly "pushing" on the sail.
One example is using a solar sail to reflect a laser beam. This concept, called a laser-pushed lightsail or laser sail, was initially proposed by G. Marx but first analyzed in detail, and elaborated on, by physicist Robert L. Forward in 1989 as a method of interstellar travel that would avoid extremely high mass ratios by not carrying fuel. Further analysis of the concept was done by Landis, Mallove and Matloff, Andrews Lubin, and others.
Forward proposed pushing a sail with a microwave beam in a later paper. This has the advantage that the sail need not be a continuous surface. Forward tagged his proposal for an ultralight sail "Starwisp". A later analysis by Landis suggested that the Starwisp concept as initially proposed by Forward
would not work, but variations on the proposal might be implemented.
The beam has to have a large diameter so that only a small portion of the beam misses the sail due to diffraction,
and the laser or microwave antenna has to have good pointing stability
so that the craft can tilt its sails fast enough to follow the center of
the beam. This gets more important when going from interplanetary travel to interstellar travel
and when going from a fly-by mission to a landing mission to a return
mission. The laser or the microwave sender would probably be a large phased array
of small devices that get their energy directly from solar radiation.
The size of the array negates the need for a lens or mirror.
Another beam-pushed concept would be to use a magnetic sail or MMPP sail to divert a beam of charged particles from a particle accelerator or plasma jet. Landis proposed a particle beam pushed sail in 1989, and analyzed in more detail in a 2004 paper. Jordin Kare
has proposed a variant to this whereby a "beam" of small laser
accelerated light sails would transfer momentum to a magsail vehicle.
Mass beam systems
Another
beam-pushed concept uses pellets or projectiles of ordinary matter. A
stream of pellets from a stationary mass-driver is "reflected" by the
spacecraft, cf. mass driver. The spacecraft neither needs energy nor reaction mass for propulsion of
its own. For craft at sub-relativistic velocities, mass beams would be
more efficient than photon beams. Nordley and Crowl point out, "A photon
must travel at the speed of light and until relativistic velocities are
reached, a reflected photon carries away almost as much energy as it
started with. A massive particle’s velocity, however, can be tuned so
that the reflected mass is left almost dead in space relative to the
beam generators, having surrendered almost all of its kinetic energy to
the starship."
A lightcraft is a vehicle currently under development that uses an external pulsed source of laser or maser energy to provide power for producing thrust.
The laser shines on a parabolic reflector on the vehicle's
underside, concentrating the light to produce a region of extremely high
temperature. The air in this region is heated and expands violently,
producing thrust with each pulse of laser light. A lightcraft must
provide this gas from onboard tanks or an ablative solid in space. By
leaving the vehicle's power source on the ground and using the ambient
atmosphere as reaction mass for much of its ascent, a lightcraft could
deliver a substantial percentage of its launch mass to orbit. It could
also potentially be very cheap to manufacture.
Testing
Early
in the morning of 2 October 2000 at the High Energy Laser Systems Test
Facility (HELSTF), Lightcraft Technologies, Inc. (LTI) with the help of
Franklin B. Mead of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and Leik Myrabo
set a new world's altitude record of 233 feet (71 m) for its 4.8 inch
(12.2 cm) diameter, 1.8-ounce (51 g), laser-boosted rocket in a flight
lasting 12.7 seconds. Although much of the 8:35 am flight was spent hovering at 230+ feet,
the Lightcraft earned a world record for the longest ever laser-powered
free flight and the greatest "air time" (i.e.,
launch-to-landing/recovery) from a light-propelled object. This is
comparable to Robert Goddard's
first test flight of his rocket design. Increasing the laser power to
100 kilowatts will enable flights up to a 30-kilometer altitude. They
aim to accelerate a one-kilogram microsatellite into low Earth orbit
using a custom-built, one-megawatt ground-based laser. Such a system
would use just about 20 dollars worth of electricity, placing launch
costs per kilogram to many times less than current launch costs (which
are measured in thousands of dollars).
Myrabo's "lightcraft"
design is a reflective funnel-shaped craft that channels heat from the
laser toward the center, using a reflective parabolic surface, causing
the laser to explode the air underneath it, generating lift. Reflective
surfaces in the craft focus the beam into a ring, where it heats air to a
temperature nearly five times hotter than the surface of the Sun,
causing the air to expand explosively for thrust.
A laser thermal rocket is a thermal rocket in which the propellant is heated by energy provided by an external laser beam. In 1992, the late Jordin Kare proposed a simpler, nearer-term concept with a rocket containing liquid hydrogen. The propellant is heated in a heat exchanger that the laser beam shines
on before leaving the vehicle via a conventional nozzle. This concept
can use continuous beam lasers, and the semiconductor lasers are now
cost-effective for this application.
In 2002, Kevin L.G. Parkin proposed a similar system using microwaves. In May 2012, the DARPA/NASA Millimeter-wave Thermal Launch System (MTLS) Project began the first steps toward implementing this idea. The MTLS Project
was the first to demonstrate a millimeter-wave absorbent refractory heat
exchanger, subsequently integrating it into the propulsion system of a
small rocket to produce the first millimeter-wave thermal rocket.
Simultaneously, it developed the first high-power cooperative target
millimeter-wave beam director and used it to attempt the first
millimeter-wave thermal rocket launch. Several launches were attempted,
but problems with the beam director could not be resolved before funding
ran out in March 2014.
Mass Beam Systems
Aerospace and mechanical engineer Artur Davoyan has been funded by NASA to study a pellet-beam system that would propel one ton payloads to 500 AU in under 20 years.
Nordley and Crowl propose vast solar arrays built by
self-replicating robots placed at the Sun-Venus equilateral Lagrange
points, capable of generating beams in the hundreds of petawatt range.
With such technologies, craft could be driven to relativistic speeds,
capable of reaching nearby stars in decades.
Economics
The motivation to develop beam-powered propulsion systems comes from the
economic advantages gained due to improved propulsion performance. In
the case of beam-powered launch vehicles, better propulsion performance
enables some combination of increased payload fraction, increased
structural margins, and fewer stages. JASON's 1977 study of laser propulsion, authored by Freeman Dyson, succinctly articulates the promise of beam-powered launch:
"Laser
propulsion as an idea that may produce a revolution in space
technology. A single laser facility on the ground can in theory launch
single-stage vehicles into low or high earth orbit. The payload can be
20% or 30% of the vehicle take-off weight. It is far more economical in
the use of mass and energy than chemical propulsion, and it is far more
flexible in putting identical vehicles into a variety of orbits."
This promise was quantified in a 1978 Lockheed Study conducted for NASA:
"The
results of the study showed that, with advanced technology, laser
rocket system with either a space- or ground-based laser transmitter
could reduce the national budget allocated to space transportation by 10
to 345 billion dollars over a 10-year life cycle when compared to
advanced chemical propulsion systems (LO2-LH2) of equal capability."
Beam director cost
The
1970s-era studies and others since have cited beam director cost as a
possible impediment to beam-powered launch systems. A recent
cost-benefit analysis estimates that microwave (or laser) thermal rockets would be economical
once beam director cost falls below 20 $/Watt. The current cost of
suitable lasers is <100 $/Watt and the cost of suitable microwave
sources is <$5/Watt. Mass production has lowered the production cost
of microwave oven magnetrons to <0.01 $/Watt and some medical lasers
to <10 $/Watt, though these are considered unsuitable for beam
directors.
Non-spacecraft applications
In 1964 William C. Brown demonstrated a miniature helicopter equipped with a combination antenna and rectifier device called a rectenna. The rectenna converted microwave power into electricity, allowing the helicopter to fly.
In 2002 a Japanese group propelled a tiny aluminium airplane by
using a laser to vaporize a water droplet clinging to it, and in 2003
NASA researchers flew an 11-ounce (312 g) model airplane with a
propeller powered with solar panels illuminated by a laser. It is possible that such beam-powered propulsion could be useful for
long-duration high altitude uncrewed aircraft or balloons, perhaps
designed to serve – like satellites do today – as communication relays,
science platforms, or surveillance platforms.
A "laser broom" has been proposed to sweep space debris
from Earth orbit. This is another proposed use of beam-powered
propulsion, used on objects not designed to be propelled by it, for
example, small pieces of scrap knocked off ("spalled") satellites. The
technique works since the laser power ablates one side of the object,
giving an impulse that changes the eccentricity of the object's orbit.
The orbit would then intersect the atmosphere and burn up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An elementary school student completing schoolwork on an iPad, 2011. Generation Z was among the first cohorts to use mobile devices in education.
A 9-year-old student reading alongside a therapy dog. Those raised in the 2000s and 2010s are much less likely to read for pleasure than prior generations.
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 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.
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 YorkRegents 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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 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.
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 is a 1953 dystopiannovel 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.
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.
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.
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 WordGrammy 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 ApartheidSouth 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."
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.
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.
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.
In 1984, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventuregame 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.
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