Education and ignorance — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Education and ignorance
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores education, literacy and how ignorance lets the animals be controlled across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'the pigs, who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals', 'they had taught themselves to read and write from an old spelling book', 'By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate in some degree.', 'Clover learnt the whole alphabet, but could not put words together.', 'None of the other animals on the farm could get further than the letter A.', 'the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who were already grown up', 'The birds did not understand Snowball's long words, but they accepted his explanation', 'I could show you this in his own writing, if you were able to read it.', 'they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion', 'Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand.', 'None of them proved able to learn the alphabet beyond the letter B.'.
How literacy is power on the farm: who can read the Commandments, who checks them, and who chooses to stay silent.
Context: Orwell's view that a revolution only improves people's lives when ordinary people are alert, and why knowledge matters to that.
For Edexcel's essay on this text, link each point to its context and the writer's purpose, which earn as many marks as knowledge of the text (16 of 40); language analysis earns no marks there.
