I’m excited to teach The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey this week in my Critical Literacies and Communities class. This is a science fiction/horror/dystopian novel that takes place 20 years after The Breakdown of society due to a fungus that turns humans into zombies, or, somewhat euphemistically, “hungries” as they are called throughout the novel. (Spoilers below.) Why have I placed this novel in a class about critical literacies and communities, and why read it with a class full of aspiring educators?

The answers to these questions started forming in 2015 when I read the novel shortly after its publication.

The central relationship in the novel is between a teacher and student: Miss Justineau and Melanie. It’s usually a hard pass for me on books that center student-teacher relationships. They are often so far removed from the actual work of education and what teaching in schools looks like today. And so is this one. But in a different way. Melanie is a hungry. The back cover introduces her like this:

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointed at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.

Melanie is a hungry and Miss Justineau is a teacher in her “classroom” on a military base. The workers on the base have orders to study high functioning hungry children, like Melanie, for possible cures to the fungus. Studying them means collecting data on their cognitive and emotional responses to a simulated classroom setting. At least up until the lead scientist calls for a child hungry to dissect in her lab. Melanie is sweet, endearing, engaged, and all but passes for a normal child if it were not for the hunger to bite – yes, eat! – any human she might smell. Yet unlike the adult hungries in the outside world that have taken over, she has some capacity to recognize this urge, resist it, and remove herself from a situation where she might do the thing she would most regret: eat Miss Justineau. Of course, much of the action teeters on this edge, especially because Miss Justineau understands that Melanie is, indeed, the girl with all the gifts, and seeks to save her from the lead scientist’s plans.

That curriculum is so central to this world is one aspect that has me so interested to teach it. The curriculum given to the child hungries is from the pre-Breakdown world: fairy tales, Greek myths, and facts and figures about cities that have since fallen. Melanie’s cell is decorated with a picture of the Amazon rainforest and a kitten drinking from a saucer of milk. It’s an understatement to say that all of their textbooks are outdated. The curriculum around the child hungries is of a world that no longer exists. And they have no idea.

This context in the early part of the novel raises this question: how is curriculum equally outdated in classrooms today? What are we asking students to learn – to believe – that is of a world that no longer exists for them? I like these questions. I think about them a lot. And I want my classes to consider them too.

This question is brought to the fore when, as characteristic of the dystopian genre, the world constructed in the early part of the novel breaks down. In this case, the walls around the military base are breached and hungries swarm. Melanie, Miss Justineau, and three other characters with conflicting interests are thrust together into the beyond. For the first time, Melanie sees, smells, touches, and perceives the world as it is - in its horror and beauty - beyond the curriculum that constructed her reality in the classroom simulation. There are no kittens drinking from saucers of milk. There is no Amazon rainforest. The population of Birmingham is zero. Yet fragments of the classroom simulation curriculum continue showing up as she reconstructs her entire understanding of the world and what she is in it. How could they not? It’s all she has known.

The novel begins in a classroom, and it ends in a classroom. The penultimate classroom, however, is not a simulation like in the beginning. It’s Miss Justineau, Melanie, and a small group of hungry children - more feral than high-functioning like Melanie, but there is hope - gathered around a makeshift white board. They’ve accepted the new world that has begun, remade by a peculiar fungus, never to go back. They are students, and their teacher starts the lesson by writing the first letter of the alphabet on the board.

I struggle with the final scene. It’s teacher-centered. It’s direct instruction. It’s banking. The children (as we’ve come to accept them over the novel, no longer just hungries) are blank slates and empty receptacles. Paulo Freire would not be pleased. But herein lies the second question, and the second reason, I wanted to teach this novel: What should the education of these children look like on the cusp of this new world that is emerging before them?

This question is one introduced much earlier in the semester while studying visionary philosophy and organizing through the writings, recordings, and conversations of James and Grace Lee Boggs. The Boggses and comrades were thinking in context with post-1967 and post-industrialized Detroit. Central to their dialectical thinking is evolution of the human: a more human human – the phrase that shows up in their writing and is often used as a shorthand reference to the ontological commitments underwriting their theory of change. The Girl with All the Gifts ends at this point of emergence. The new world has begun. The (hungry) children will be the adults of this new world in which Miss Justineau and any other surviving adults cannot inhabit. What should education and learning look like?

I’m glad to be reading this novel as the class launches into the final third of the semester where we explore participatory approaches to learning. Participatory approaches and epistemologies have their own answers to this question. And the final scene of the novel invites us to answer the “what should” question through various educational approaches.