7th Grade
English                                                                                         Name:__________________

The Giver, by Lois
Lowry

Thinking Ahead: Your
Perfect World

It
is the year 2015.

The Earth has been
destroyed.  The last nuclear bomb
has exploded.

When it was obvious to everyone
that the war would come, a world famous scientist had filled a spacecraft with
scientifically sleep-induced children.
His name was Dr. Kafka.

The children ranged from pre-born
embryos (in a kind of warm yellow gel) to 12-month-olds, from a wide variety of
groups, from all over the world.

Years before the war, Dr. Kafka
had found, orbiting a distant star, a planet that was a nearly perfect copy of
Earth, the same atmosphere, plants, forests, islands, deserts, and animal
life…except there were no people there.  Dr. Kafka dreamed of saving the human
race.  With the end near, he planned
to build a colony on that “sister planet” of earth.  He
wanted to start over from the beginning, fresh, with a generation raised in
innocence, humans who had never heard of war, or hatred, or any of the problems
on earth.

One of the children on that
spaceship was your brother, Stephen, a three-month-old infant.  You came aboard the ship secretly, and
when the steel door slammed shut, you were taken by surprise, and trapped.  The floor began to tremble.  You were in a room surrounded by
sleeping, dreaming young lives.  The
ship began to break the earth’s atmosphere just as the bombs began to
fall…

You never found Stephen among the
“nursing capsules” that survived take-off.

After a time, you found Dr. Kafka
in another part of the ship.  You
were amazed; his experiments with radiation had left him sick and pale.  He did not have long to live.  Indeed, after four terrible months, Dr.
Kafka was dead, leaving the project of designing
a new way of life in your hands…

Your job is to describe the colony that Dr.
Kafka dreamed of.

TEN GENERATIONS HAVE
PASSED.  Those children have
grown up, and their children, and their children, etc.  The population is in the 100’s of
thousands.  All your plans have
succeeded!  They are living in the
world YOU designed, under the system YOU established.

RULE: You have access to
any kind of technology that exists on our world (television, computers, etc.)
BUT you DO NOT HAVE TO use it, and you CANNOT use any science fiction new
technology that does not really exist.
(Do NOT just copy ideas from The Giver, of course.)

What is the system you set up in the world?  Describe the systems for:

§         …
laws, rules, and punishments

§         …how
people are educated

§         …finding
and choosing leaders, and how the government runs

§         …how people raise families, and find
enjoyment

Those four things will be the biggest part of your thinking.  But you can also think of city plans,
music, sports, and anything else you want to that could make life better.

This project is based on an
idea © by Michael Roy.