In chapter 2, the group of students is shown the babies conditioning rooms.
The groups of students are moving to the Nurseries. There is a notice board where the words “Infant Nurseries. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms” are posted. Some nurses present babies, wearing the Delta caste`s khaki-colored clothes. These are Bokanovsky produced babies who are eight-months old. The nurses show the babies books and flowers.
When they get interested , they get a mild electric shock so that they associate books and flowers with pain, which will eventually lead to an instinctive hatred of books and flowers.
Later on the director begins to tell a story to the students. It`s about a boy named Reuben, who has polish-speaking parents. He explains that in the World-state words like “mother” and “father” are now to be recognized as pornographic. He continues Reuben`s story. It`s about the discovery which they call sleep-teaching or hypnopaedia. Reuben listened one night to the radio, where George Bernard Shaw held a speech. The next day, he was able to repeat the speech word for word, but he had no idea what it meant. The director says that the place where hypnopaedia can be used is moral training.
Finally the director leads the tour to a dormitory where some Beta children are sleeping. The Elemantary Class Consciousness lesson has just begun. The children listen to voices, who explain to them that Alpha children have to work harder than anyone else. The voices whispers that the Beta-castes are the proudest and happiest of the system. They are smarter than the Gammas,Deltas and Epsilons but they do not have to work as hard as an Alpha.
This lesson is repeated one hundred and twenty times, for thirty months.
The director ends up the tour with the conclusion: “Hypnopaedia is the greatest moralizing and socializing force for all time.”
Topics for analysis:- the sleep-teaching and hypnopaedia (Reuben`s story)
- Beta children and their appearance
(Jannis)