Island, by Aldous Huxley

This paper will discuss the pros and cons of the life on Pala in the areas of education, religion, dying, and self-actualization for every person. The methods of selfactualization will be presented here and compared with methods of Western culture. A conclusion about which culture best allows a person a life of self-actualization, Western or Pala, will be drawn.

In Island, Western culture and the culture of the utopian Pala come into direct conflict when newspaper reporter Will Farnaby from England is shipwrecked and thrown onto the island. The island has never been visited by a reporter, and this shows how much the island has been cut off from the rest of the world. Its philosophical ideals have been put into practice by now for more than 100 years.

The people of Pala believe in a different type of schooling than Westerners do. They believe that school is not only for learning specific thoughts but also for learning with one's whole being, in a very broad context. This is exemplified by the nurse Radha's explanation of the way she was taught medicine: "Whether it's prevention or whether it's cure, we attack on all the fronts at once. All the fronts, from diet to auto-suggestion, from negative ion

. . .
o conduct sex classes in "maithuna." Ranga, Radha's boyfriend, explains: The point about the sexuality of children. What we're born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up. Maithuna is the organized attempt to regain that paradise. Will is surprised that the Palanese are taught this at school; as he says, everybody in Western culture would object. For they believe in conventionalism, that something is right if and only if society approves of it. Teaching young adults how to enjoy their bodies through pleasurable sex is not "right" in Western culture. And they also believe in the Divine Command Theory, that something is right if God approves of it, which conversely means that something is wrong if God does not approve of it. Overall, God does not approve of sex in Western culture, and so God certainly would not approve of teaching sex to teenagers as a regular practice in schools. This is definitely "not right." But "people are still having sex," as the pop/rock Western culture hit proclaims, and so there i
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1555
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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