Discussion - Questions For your classroom 1. Have students look at the importance of entertainment in their own lives or in the lives of their friends (what sorts of entertainment do they enjoy: Internet, movies, music, TV etc…) How much of their time do they spend consuming entertainment? 1. Look at how entertainment is marketed to us and how it affects us.
1. Research how commercials and advertisements are produced to be both entertaining and convincing. 1. Research addiction and its causes. Is entertainment addictive? Can it serve the same purposes as drugs or alcohol? 1. Beatty suggests that mindless entertainment can weaken or destroy the mind. Is there evidence of this? Examine research done on the effects of different forms of entertainment on our ability to think, learn and comprehend. 1. Look at Beatty’s speech to Montag (pages 53-62). What techniques does Beatty advocate for keeping people happy? What parallels do you see between Beatty’s ideas and our own society, especially in the area of occupying people’s minds with trivia? 1. Examine stress, pressure and speed in life and how they effect us. (Look, for example at “road rage” and other such phenomena.) How do addictions (drugs, alcohol, television, entertainment, etc.) relate? 1. Read Fahrenheit 451 and compare the book with the play you have just seen: what are the differences. 1. Pick a year in the Movie/Book Timeline (on the following page) that you have read and seen. What are the differences between the two? Which one were you more interested in? What was cut or censured? 1. Imagine the next chapter of Fahrenheit 451. What is Montag doing in the future? Describe the new society around him?
Source Key Neilsen Media Research 2000, McNeal, 1992. Cited by National Institute on Media and the Family, 2000.
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