As a person who adores reading, I have my favorite genres. Among them is the dystopian novel: I enjoy it because each series or book represents what an author believes is the ideal society and yet everything goes horribly wrong. The series I just finished, the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, illustrates this example quite clearly. (I finished the series on Monday, but that counts as recent, even if I have another book I finished right after that). Although the Divergent series is but one of many dystopian novels to come out, it has prevalence to our current society.
In the Divergent series, people belong to factions based upon their dominant personality trait. People who consider themselves intellectuals above all choose Erudite, people who believe truth is the ultimate ideal choose Candor, and so on and so on. In doing so, the theory is that people wind up performing the tasks for which they are uniquely suited and each faction supports society and contributes equally to it. Those who cannot complete the initiation into a faction or drop out for whatever reason are deemed "factionless" and complete the tasks no one else wants to do. They scramble for food and resources in a world where the factions are privileged.
Such a system might work better if people were so linear. As we discover in the first book, Tris, along with Four, possesses attributes that mark her as a potential candidate for Abnegation (the selfless faction), Amity (friendship), and Dauntless (fearless). Rather than embrace these people for their uniqueness, people like Jeanine Matthews, the head of the Erudite faction, condemn them and they must hide their talents. Here the system breaks down, as dystopian novels usually do. Later on in the series, the excuse for sorting people is given that these people are genetically damaged and thus, enter into the faction that supports the particular attribute that is stronger to the exclusion of others.
Arbitrary selection like this bears a strong resemblance to our society. Rather than people selecting their lifelong associations through a ceremony and initiation...people are placed in certain areas and unable to move. The group that the factions had originally nominated to decide for them, the Abnegation (decided because power belongs to those who do not want to wield it), lose their power because of a hostile takeover. This type of action occurs all the time in real life when militants and zealots consume the political system.
I find it fascinating how perfect worlds break down. When I first started reading Divergent, I had fun imagining which faction I would choose. (I decided on Erudite). To discover the actual reasoning behind the factions, as well as discovering that the faction system was flawed, was a shock I enjoyed. It is akin to learning about democracy as a child and thinking it functions perfectly...until an injustice occurs. I believe that is a key lesson that children do not really receive. They find out how democracy works...but not what happens when it ceases doing what it should.
Did children learn why the government shut down? Or is this too intricate for children to conceive? It was once said that children's books hold more weighty concepts than adults' books (I cannot for the life of me remember the exact quote, so I beg your pardon). If that is so, and Divergent and other dystopian books like it are quantified as young adult, then why should we try to sugarcoat the way our country does and does not work? Why teach blind patriotism or that the system works only to discover that it does not work as well as one hopes?
I feel as though history and democracy represent inequality. History is written by the victors. Is democracy written by the champions? If so, who is the true winner in this? The child who blindly believes in the factions in Divergent and in the government in real life? The adult who discovers the factions' flaws in Divergent and the difficulties in real life? The two do not need to be so separate. Children learn a lot more than adults give them credit for.
Perhaps they too can see the representation of reality within the dystopian books set in worlds and times far removed from ours and perhaps they too can take away that no system is perfect. It is simply a matter of being able to handle one that is perfectly imperfect.
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