Artifact 6

The Giver by Lois Lowry

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

I have read The Giver several times. It was my introduction to dystopian fiction, which is a genre that I love. I read Ayn Rand's Anthem recently, and if you're looking for a similar book to The Giver, it is eerily reminiscent of a mix between Anthem and Brave New World. In The Giver, it is such an amazing moment realizing for the first time that the people of that community don’t see colour, that they’re so inflexible and devoid of creativity and imagination that all the vibrancy has been sucked from their life. The hope lies in the passing on of knowledge to the future: from The Giver to Jonas, and then from Jonas to Gabe.

Like The Giver, education is supposed to expose students to difficult knowledge—to tough stuff and concepts that make them question the world and their identity. This is not a popular point of view right now, especially in the liberal arts in academic, with trigger warnings and safe spaces, but I believe any knowledge worth knowing are things that should be struggled over and grappled with. Jonas doesn’t love all the knowledge he receives from The Giver, not all of it is pleasant, like love, but can be terrible, like pain, but regardless Jonas is a better person for receiving that knowledge and interpreting it from there.

As teachers we need to navigate the stormy seas of life with our students, show them a way. Yes, there is pain, yes there are complicated ideas out there, not everything has a simple answer, or any answer. But we need to let our students know that they are not alone, and that we can work through problems and concepts together.