The famous “1984” Apple Macintosh commercial, which ran during that year’s Super Bowl.
Classic Literature
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Updated | June, 2013
In 1949, when George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was first published, the New York Times book reviewer wrote that, though it was “not impressive as a novel about particular human beings” as a “prophecy and a warning” it was “superb.”
How much of that prophecy came to pass? How many of the book’s warnings are relevant today? Musing in 2010 about “Why Orwell Endures,” Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote:
Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or double-think — the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.
Use the resources below to help your students read Orwell in the context of the world today.
Teaching Ideas
Apply Quotes: Below, some famous lines from “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” “Animal Farm,” “Politics and the English Language,” and other works by Orwell.
Challenge your students to choose one or more and apply them to life today in as many ways as they can — starting, of course, by finding Times articles with which they resonate. (Even if, or maybe especially because, Orwell also once wrote, “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”)
- Big Brother is watching you.
- Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- Double-think means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
- Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
- All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
- Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
- During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
- Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
- Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Use Our Lesson Plan to Update “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: In a 2010 lesson, “Big Brother vs. Little Brother: Updating ‘1984,’ students first compare “1984 vs. Today”, then create a treatment for a modern film, print or stage adaptation that revolves around current technologies.
Related Times Articles and Opinion Pieces, Past and Present
From the Archives:
- 1949 Book Review | Nineteen Eighty-four
- 1950 Obituary | George Orwell, Author, 46, Dead
- 1981 | ‘Big Brother’ Is Racing ‘1984’ Deadline
- 1984 | The message for today in Orwell’s ‘1984’
- 1984 | Soviet Says Orwell Vision is a Reality in U.S.
- 1985 | John Hurt in ‘1984,’ Adaptation of Orwell Novel
- 1991 | Decreasing Our Word Power: The New Newspeak
Recent Articles on Orwell
- 2010 | Why Orwell Endures
- 2012 | George Orwell’s Diaries
- 2012 | George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.
- 2011 | This Isn’t ‘1984’
- 2008 | What George Orwell Wrote, 70 Years Later to the Day
- 2003 | Simpler Terms; If It’s ‘Orwellian,’ It’s Probably Not
- 1998 | Literary Pilgrimmages: George Orwell
- 1998 | George Orwell’s List
On Privacy and Other Orwellian Themes:
- 2013 | Judge Questions Legality of N.S.A. Phone Records, describes as “almost Orwellian”
- 2013 | U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls
- 2013 | U.S. Confirms That It Gathers Online Data Overseas
- 2013 | Obama Calls Surveillance Programs Legal and Limited
- 2013 | In U.S., News of Surveillance Effort Is Met With Some Concern but Little Surprise
- 2013 Op-Ed | Intelligence for Dummies
- 2013 | Op-Ed | Peeping Barry
- 2013 | Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading
- 2013 | Staying Private on the New Facebook
- 2012 | ‘Big Brother’? No, It’s Parents
- 2012 | How Big Data Became So Big
- 2011 | Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS
- 2011 | Questions for Amazon on Privacy and the Kindle Fire
- California Notice
- 2011 | You’re Mad! You’re On YouTube!
- 2010 | Little Brother Is Watching
- 2010 | Officials Push to Bolster Law on Wiretapping
- 2010 | Little Brother is Watching
- 2010 | The Web Means the End of Forgetting
- 2010 | How Privacy Vanishes Online
- California Notice
- 2009 | Amazon.com Plays Big Brother With Famous E-Books
- 2007 | Interrogation Methods are Criticized
- 2002 | You are a Suspect
Related Learning Network Resources
Lessons about Literature and Orwell:
- Big Brother vs. Little Brother: Updating Orwell’s ’1984’
- Dark Materials: Reflecting on Dystopian Themes in Young Adult Literature
- Literary Pilgrimmages: Exploring the Role of Place in Writers’ Lives and Work
- It’s All an Allusion: Identifying Allusions, in Literature and in Life
- Beyond the Book Report: Ways to Respond to Literature Using New York Times Models”
Lessons about Technology, Surveillance and Privacy:
- Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries?
- Spy vs. Spy?
- Data Defense
- Keeping A Watchful Eye”
- Public I Or Private I
- Secret Agent Men
- Cyberattack Detection Versus Privacy Protection
- California Notice
- Under Electronic Lock and Key
Lessons on Propaganda and Censorship:
Lessons about Related Historical Events:
Related Student Opinion Questions:
- Should Schools Put Tracking Devices in Students’ I.D. Cards?
- Do You Worry About the Lack of Anonymity in the Digital Age?
Related Times Topics Pages
More Learning Network “Classic Lit” Pages
We have a long and growing list of pages like this for the authors and works that are most read and taught in high schools in the United States. In the era of the Common Core, when English teachers are asked to pair fiction with nonfiction, we hope they’ll be especially helpful. And you can find more ideas for teaching literature with The New York Times here.
- Shakespeare
- “To Kill a Mockingbird”
- J.D. Salinger and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’
- “The Odyssey”
- “The Great Gatsby”
- “Frankenstein”
- “The Lord of the Flies”
- Mark Twain and “Huckleberry Finn”
- “The Grapes of Wrath”
- “The Crucible”
- “Death of a Salesman”
- “Harry Potter”
- Charles Dickens
- “The Hunger Games”
This post originally attributed the line, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf" to George Orwell, who did not write it. We have removed it from our list.
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