Just Because: 'The Dispossessed'

When my son was little, we read the first book of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy and loved it. So, when, a couple of months ago, he told me that her Dispossessed was possibly his favorite book and a friend of his echoed that sentiment, I added it to my reading list. In San Francisco one afternoon, I happened to find myself near City Lights bookstore ~ and one does not find oneself near City Lights without going in. So I did. And I found The Dispossessed and took it up to the counter, where the cashier excitedly pointed out that it was his favorite book and the guy behind me in line said that not only was it his favorite, but he had written his thesis on it. Now, what I usually do is regale you with the first page or so of a book, but in this case ~ as I just read a section about education that I find particularly applicable to today (and this was written in 1974) ~ I will do that but add that later section as well.

CHAPTER
ONE

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
   Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
   Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the
ships, and the worlds they came from , and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
   Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
   A number of people were coming along the road towards the landing field, or standing around where the road cut through the wall. ...

CHAPTER
FIVE

...
   They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren't working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares.
   What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.
   He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.
   "Well, of course," Shevek said, troubled. "If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it."
   They went away unappeased, but polite. They were pleasant boys, with frank and civil manners. Shevek's readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, "You put another lock on the door and call it democracy." He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.
   ...