Literary Devices: Teaching Social Contract Theory with A Short Story

Abstract

Teaching the social contract tradition to students can be frustrating. Works by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau may seem arcane, abstract, or irrelevant to students. Yet, it is important for students to think about what processes or mechanisms would make consent and dissent legitimate. To address this problem, this paper explains how to use a short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” to examine the procedures of obtaining consent and of engaging in dissent. This paper includes: a plot summary, two paths for integrating “Omelas” into syllabi, and a number of practical tools to use in the classroom, including discussion questions, learning objectives, and a classroom activity. After reading it, you should be able to decide if “Omelas” would be a good addition to your syllabus and, if so, how to use it in your classroom.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• Citizenship
• critical thinking
• undergraduate education

Notes

1 Two video resources can be used to compare “Omelas” with Rumspringa: Devil’s Playground, an award-winning documentary, and Amish: Out of Order. Several useful short videos from Amish: Out of Order are available on the National Geographic website (Gingerich 2010; Walker 2002).

2 For a more extensive discussion of resistance and revolution in Le Guin’s work, consider pairing “Omelas” with the short story “The Day After the Revolution” or the novel The Dispossessed. “Revolution” focuses on a dissident who exited from Omelas, led a successful revolution, and founded an anarchist society. The Dispossessed revisits this same anarchist society decades later (Burns 2008; Le Guin 1974a; Le Guin 1974b).

3 Le Guin, who wrote in a male-dominated genre, science fiction, and pushed to make it a more inclusive form, described herself as “a woman writer of science fiction.” She noted that she was “a very rare creature,” one that “was at first believed to be mythological, like the tribble and the unicorn.” (PBS 2020)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennet Kirkpatrick

Jennet Kirkpatrick is Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University. Her research focuses on resistance. She is the author of Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics and The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics.