“WORDS ARE LIKE X-RAYS”: EDUCATION AS A MECHANISM OF CONTROL IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD

Sa？etak The concept of education has been implicitly or explicitly present as a central theme of the modern dystopian fiction stemming from the early twentieth century, so it comes as no surprise that it plays a pivotal role in Aldous Huxley’s nightmarish society aptly described in his seminal novel published in 1932, Brave New World. Taking into account John Dewey’s famous dictum which states that “the conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind” (1997: 101), this paper aims to explore Huxley’s novel as a fictionalised warning against how exactly education1 can be used as a mechanism of mass control and a tool of societal exploitation. It aspires to do so by applying two theoretical frameworks in concord with surveillance pedagogy: Paulo Freire’s banking concept of education and Michel Foucault’s docile bodies and bio-power