The Utopian Environment: Educating a Social Potential

Abstract

This paper sets out to answer the question what inhabitants of the utopian societies in Thomas More’s humanist Utopia (1516), Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s feminist Herland (1915) and William Morris’s socialist News from Nowhere (1890) have to learn in order to sustain their particular utopian equilibria. Through textual analysis, the utopian ideal - the highest individual potential and the highest potential of society as a whole - is discussed for each text. Consequently, the educational patterns connecting the two potentials are identified. The utopian narratives studied show a common principle in citizenship education: the individual potential is linked to interaction with fellow utopians, giving rise to a social potential. Although varying in form, this social potential is primarily internalised through experiential learning in all three texts.