Totalitarian Caste Systems in Dystopian Fantasy
A Guest Blog Post by: A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Totalitarianism is a system of government that is headed by an absolute dictator who supports themselves with some kind of violent force. In a totalitarian country there is no freedom of the people. One example of totalitarianism can be found in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The Final Empire is headed by the Lord Ruler, who uses emotional manipulation against the populous. They are required to believe only what the Steel Ministry tells them and treat the Lord Ruler as god. The Final Empire is also a caste system. A caste system is a system of government in which people are divided into sections based on race and or job description. The Final Empire is not an exact Caste System sine the Garrison and a few merchants come from the Skaa population.
A better example of a Totalitarian Caste System is Suzanne Collins’s series Hunger Games. In Hunger Games President Snow represents the the absolute ruler and the Hunger Games themselves serve as the violent force. The caste system in Panam is much stricter than the one in the Final Empire. The people are confined to geographically separated districts that are each in charge of one resource that is distributed across the whole country, such as coal lumber, and technology. District Thirteen is the rebel district, their Mistborn counterparts would be the thieving crews. In both dystopian societies the government mostly ignored the rebels, avoiding conflict and keeping the peace. Up until the nineteen forties India was a real life example of a totalitarian caste system. The noblemen and Garrison plus the District two and the capital are equal to the Kshatriyas. Likewise the Chandles are similar to the thieving crews or district thirteen.
Totalitarian caste systems are terrible for everyone except the people on top. Even now as a democracy India is a miserable place still scarred by its past government. On the flip side, the opposite of a totalitarian caste system would be a world with no ruler or government system at all. You may note that in the United States religious freedom only goes as far as it can without infringing on other peoples’ rights. Or it was supposed to anyway. Both extremes are bad. People need guidance, not total dominance. Rules, not oppression.
Hard Roads to Cultural Literacy
In May of 2019, I read a book called Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. I remember it being riveting. When I logged it on Goodreads all I wrote was, “Excellent and fascinating.” I was dating my now husband at the time and I remember sharing with him sections I thought he would enjoy, as we both like geology and one of our dates was to the HMNS gemstone exhibit. At one point I laughed out loud at something clever Meldahl wrote (I don’t recall what it was) and my husband commented that it is a rare geology book that causes one to laugh in pleasure.
Naturally, I thought this would make excellent assigned reading for my homeschooled highschooler. But one chapter into it she was struggling. It wasn’t the reading level, she has a collegiate reading level and has had one for a few years now. I was certain it couldn’t be the science as she had been perusing geology books since childhood and had done a whole geology curriculum with a friend as part of their own little science club they created. Nerds. I went over the science with her and she kept reading. It became less of a struggle, but she is not laughing out loud with pleasure from her geology book.
Then I started reading Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch and things became clearer. In Cultural Literacy Hirsch talks about a study done on the results of seven year olds who took a reading assessment test. In the test the children were asked to read a story about a spider. The children who had more prior knowledge about spiders scored higher on the reading comprehension questions about the story (which did not require special knowledge about spiders) than those who did not know much about spiders.
I shared this with my oldest daughter, as we often study together while the younger kids are playing. We discussed it and determined that it makes sense to not get hung up on something being mentioned in passing because you already know a lot on a topic and can picture it in your mind with little effort, but to struggle to retain what something is about if it mentions a lot of things you’re trying to picture because you’re not as familiar with them. Perhaps it is easier to envision Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web if as a child you also have watched a real spider build its web, perhaps it is easier to remember the story if you’ve seen or read about how baby spiders hatch. Or, if you’ve had Charlotte’s Web read to you as a child, maybe a technical book on pig husbandry would be easier to retain as an adult. Hirsch includes an example of college students reading a paragraph about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and struggling because they had no prior knowledge of who they were and how they related to the Civil War (shocking because these were college students out of Virginia).
I was reminded about a public schooled girl I was working with who had failed her reading portion on her standardized tests. Her phonics were impeccable, but where she struggled was comprehension. When I worked with her, almost every time she struggled to read something it was because she had never heard the word. She didn’t have the vocabulary to support her phonics skills. I advised the family to listen to audiobooks, read stories together at night, talk to each other more, look words up in the dictionary. Children learn the meanings of words by hearing them, then when they see them on paper for the first time while sounding it out… they have a picture in their mind of what that word means, feels like, or how it can be used in different sentences. Kids should always have access to stories above their reading level, so that they can learn grammar structures and vocabulary words organically. Hirsch drives home the idea that you can know how to read and still be illiterate if you don’t know anything about what you’re reading.
I told my daughter how this was interesting to me because my husband had said he thought she didn’t know enough geology to read Hard Road West smoothly, even though I thought it was a very approachable book and that she had a strong foundation in geology. She and I laughed over the time a volunteer at the museum asked her what a specific rock smelled like and the big reveal fell flat when she answered, “Sulfur.” Poor guy deflated and said, “Yes, it’s Sulfur. You must be homeschooled.” Apparently the public school kids her age on field trips liked to shout “Farts!” She was about seven at the time and it is one of her favorite museum memories. (I’m not going to lie, even if I knew it was sulfur at seven, I’d probably have shouted “Farts!” too, but I went to public school.)
“So, why, if you’ve read all the same geology books we read as children, is this geology book difficult? Because I genuinely don’t think it would have been difficult for me at fifteen.” That is when she confessed that the geology books we owned and had spent hours reading… she hadn’t actually been reading them: “I was looking at the pretty rocks. I could tell you the page numbers where all my favorite rocks are, all the prettiest ones, I didn’t read all the stuff…” We genuinely laughed together, two wildly different personalities approaching children’s geology books in wildly different ways. As Charlotte Mason said, “Children are born persons.” But for every moment, like this geology one where she struggles because maybe she didn’t pay as much attention to what was put before her in the past, she has so many where she shines. She catches every Shakespeare reference. Every time. (Hirsch writes a bit about how Shakespeare allusions used to be quite common in all kinds of writing, including business memos, but as of the publication of his book in 1987, that was no longer the case.)
Hirsch’s argument for cultural literacy was never meant to be for homeschool parents to refine the presentation of their educational feasts, his goal is educational reform in the public sector. There is extensive discussion in his book about the struggle to properly regulate education in that if you mandate that schools teach at least two Shakespeare plays there will always be arguments about which two should be selected and that no two districts will choose the same two, therefore knowing who Shakespeare is might be universal, but catching Shakespeare references will vary. (I vote for all the Shakespeare. Every play! All the sonnets!) But I did feel like Hirsch’s essay very much affirmed the education I am providing. Maybe my oldest gets a little bogged down in this particular geology book, but to be fair, it could easily be assigned in a college course, most high school students wouldn’t be reading it between their Homer and Geometry lessons. The paragraph that boggled the minds of the Virginian community college students in the 1980s didn’t phase her, and for that I have hope.
Additional affirmation came when I realized I had owned other books by Hirsch in the past. He’s the one that wrote the series Everything Your ___Grader Needs to Know. My first two years of formal homeschooling (first and second grade), I had read those books out loud the last month of the traditional school year to see if we were covering everything. What I learned was reading those books out loud was a waste of time because a classical Charlotte Mason education is thorough and she not only knew what she needed, but she knew richer versions than the sad paragraphs presented. That was the final nail in the coffin on us ever relying on textbooks. Cultural literacy can be gained from textbooks, but it’s boring and far less effective. The better road to true literacy, in my opinion, is living books. I donated Hirsch’s other books, but I’m keeping Cultural Literacy.
One whole day after finishing Cultural Literacy, I went to our local library to donate a bag of books I was purging from my collection. There on the shelf next to the library bookstore register was E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a compilation of all the things the average American graduate should know, for $2. Of course I bought it.
“Also unrealistic is the pragmatist emphasis on individuality, at least as the idea has been institutionalized. The best teaching does accommodate itself to individual differences in temperament, but a child’s temperament does not come freighted with content. To learn a culture is natural to human beings. Children can express individuality only in relation to the traditions of their society, which they have to learn. The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly uncertain, and fragmented education. Americans in their teens and twenties who were brought up under individualistic theories are not less conventional than their predecessors, only less literate, less able to express their individuality.” – E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, pg. 126.
Getting to Know Charlotte
A Homeschool Life…
When I was first sold on homeschooling, I was smitten with the classical model. I learned later that most “classical” models being advertised in the United States are actually “neo-classical” in practice. They have taken an essay written by Dorothy L. Sayers on the Trivium and pigeon-holed it into something it wasn’t exactly meant to be. The neo-classical model sort of married the United States educational “ideal” and pushes intense academia early, limits the elementary school years to a lot of memorization (the grammar stage), and taken to the extreme (like anything taken to an extreme), steals joy from students and teachers alike.
If you have followed my blog for the last fifteen years, you might remember me “homeschooling” my toddler. (FYI, pre-school is just parenting, not homeschooling. It’s literally PRE school.) Pressured by a narcissistic ex who demanded that my then three year old be able to read already (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force formal reading lessons on children under six), be able to copy out poems (it’s not developmentally appropriate to force small children to write, look up x-rays of their hand bones), and wanted her to be trained as some government super spy assassin (I am a third degree black belt in Kung Fu, but some people have watched too many movies and have no sense of reality and I used to be married to “some people”). Homeschool regret #1: giving into the pressure of my ex to do formal reading lessons because she was bright and could do it and I was hyperlexic and was reading at age three despite knowing that educational studies have long stated that formal lessons shouldn’t begin until six. Homeschool regret #2: ever handing her a worksheet in kindergarten, which wasn’t often, but still…
The things I am proud of, however, is that despite all this pressure, we always focused on living books above all else and I encouraged verbal narrations for years. I do not regret the neo-classical homeschool co-ops we joined (and left), they held an important role in our lives at the time and I met some cherished and beloved friends there even if I was regularly told: you’re not very classical, you’re too Charlotte Mason. The first time I heard that, I started doing some research…
I learned that Charlotte Mason was very classical, and what calls itself classical these days just isn’t. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that I still very much subscribe to both tactics of education and as my oldest is now in highschool and I have three more children with one creeping up on kindergarten (FYI: kindergarten is also PRE- school), I’ve been doing even more reading and research and want to share my favorite resources… the ones I don’t regret.
First: if you’re new to homeschooling or not loving your current homeschool rhythm, this is my favorite link to send parents: The Five Flavors of Homeschooling. I like to share this link so much, I have gotten restricted on Facebook as a potential scammer, despite not having violated the group rules in any of the places I posted it. Knowing your “flavor” can save you a lot of money on homeschool pursuits, and I definitely feel like (having been a single homeschool mom who wasn’t receiving child support that was owed) Charlotte Mason and Unit Studies are the easiest to accomplish for FREE.
Which brings me to my next two resources: Ambleside Online (not an online school) and Well Educated Heart, two curricula that are totally FREE. Ambleside Online is named “online” so as to not confuse it with the Christian private school based on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy still operating in the UK. It’s a full “scope and sequence” and any time you can’t find a title for free or a price you can afford, you can usually access it on Project Gutenberg or substitute it with something suitable. The focus is having the students read real books and source documents, narrating those books, and embracing the idea that Education is the Science of Relations by making connections to things they have studied and the world around them. Well Educated Heart is very similar, but clusters the material into something like unit studies, despite Charlotte Mason discouraging unit studies (because she wanted the children to make the connection, not have the teacher present the ideas already connected). Well Educated Heart offers their curricula for free and the feature I like most is that the audio files are also available on their site for… wait for it… FREE.
But wait, what is narration? That brings me to my third resource that I like to send people: Episode 7 of Cindy Rollins’s podcast The New Mason Jar. I had already read Karen Glass’s book Know and Tell (as well as Charlotte Mason’s original Home Education series) when I stumbled across the podcast episode and I think the podcast is a more approachable way for people to access the road to narration because (Gasp!) a lot of people don’t want to read the books (it actually drives me nuts, but I kind of get it: people are busy, especially mothers). The beauty of pursuing the art of narration isn’t just in the brain development aspect (which is phenomenal), it’s also the price tag… narration is… you guessed it… FREE. No fancy writing programs, no workbooks checking reading comprehension, no drama. A verbal narration costs nothing but the work of a brain muscle and a listening ear plus time. As the students get older a composition book and pen will do the trick. Charlotte Mason educations are truly thorough and affordable. I still teach essay writing, Charlotte Mason purists say they don’t, but a narration is basically an expository essay written beautifully. I still don’t use curricula to teach essay writing, we use narrations and read a lot of well written essays (and sermons) and writing memoirs. My oldest loved Zen in the Art of Writing by Bradbury (after reading Fahrenheit 451) and Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Her seventh grade year also included Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Writing Life. I think the inspiration of her favorite authors talking about their writing lives was the most effective writing tutor I could have ever received.
Other things I’m pleased I did, but will definitely do more of with the younger ones:
- Fairy Tales: read all the fairy tales
- Music: classical music, folk songs, sea shanties, hymns… studying music throughout history and enjoying it in passing has done nothing but enrich our lives and our studies. My oldest plays the tin whistle, piano, clarinet, violin, and pretty much any instrument she can get her hands on. She also enjoyed two years of choir.
- Scripture Memory Box
- Poetry: we added a memory box just for poetry and the kids are loving it. Instead of being set up the way it is for the scripture memory box as described in the YouTube video I linked, it only has month tabs and we read a poem every day that month. This is in addition to the poetry we study for language arts.
- Picture Study: I want to be more intentional about this in the future, but currently we just decorate our home with real art. Paintings we find at Goodwill or garage sales plus a few John William Waterhouse prints I have always loved.
- Classical Conversations songs: they’re neo-classical, they’re expensive, but my goodness if you can find the CDs used somewhere or splurge on their overpriced app, the kids love and remember their awful songs! The Timeline song has been an atrocious gift that keeps on giving and I’m so happy it was and is a part of our lives.
This semester (Fall 2025), the oldest and I have been reading Charlotte Mason’s Ourselves. One of the fun things about homeschooling in the teen years is that as they grow and reason and read for themselves they really start to see the light regarding the choices you have made as a parent and educator over the years. Ourselves isn’t her favorite book, she didn’t catch right off the bat that Mason was alluding to Prudentius–She hasn’t read Prudentius. I’m 41 and have only read some of his work and The Fight for Mansoul just happened to be one of them because I’m a ‘buy all the Latin texts I can afford’ junkie.–But she is having thoughtful conversations with me about it and understands the value of it having been assigned. She can describe the Trivium and how it is needed when learning something new… you always start with the grammar stage (memorizing new facts, acquiring basic knowledge on a subject), move to a logic and dialectic stage (when you can understand and reason through the ideas presented in the subject at hand), and finally rest in a state of rhetoric (being able to express the ideas persuasively), and that these stages will be repeated throughout your whole life as you pursue new things to learn because education is a lifetime pursuit. It’s exciting to be here, even though she’s only in 9th grade, only fifteen years old, even though she wanted to start college courses several years ago and won’t be actually starting one until next semester, it is so exciting to be here and the teen years are absolutely my favorite… and I think Charlotte Mason (and more importantly God) has had a lot to do with that.
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All About a Face That Launched 1000 Ships
…And a Book That Launched 1000 Rabbit Trails…
Fall of 2025 has been the semester in which my 9th grader has been reading the complete and unabridged Iliad for the first time. We have read picture books, chapter books, and abridged works over the years (Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee, was probably my favorite), but now we’re nearly in the big leagues (the real big leagues would be reading it in Greek, maybe one day…).
I have maintained my habit of reading something new alongside teaching something old to me over the years, and while re-reading Homer’s Iliad (and listening to the Ascend podcast episodes with the kiddo) I decided to meander through Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Bettany Hughes. Meander is the most appropriate word because, like my blog, Hughes’s work frolics about joyfully and a little chaotically. It’s entertaining though repetitive, it’s amusing and long-winded.
Czarney Pies, a Goodreads user, reviewed:
“Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore” is a scatter-gun, scatter-brained work that is nonetheless highly entertaining. Reading it is something like inviting your friends from your undergraduate years over for dinner, plying them generously with alcohol and letting them rant on about whatever literary or artistic idea comes into their minds. History students will express themselves on Beethoven. English lit graduates will give you their opinions on Rabelais while philosophy students will tell you what they think the Federal Reserve Board should do about interest rates. The cacophony is as joyous as it is incoherent. As Hughes herself notes at one point that she may be presenting “a mangle of literary and social references (with a sprinkling of fanstasy [sic]) rather than historical fact.” (pp. 285- 286)
Quite frankly, that is the best description of Hughes’s work that could ever exist, in my opinion. I love this paragraph from Czarney Pies’s review so much I copied it –TWICE– into my commonplace journal. (I didn’t realize I was copying it for a second time until I was halfway through doing it and had a déjà vu moment.)
Pies makes you want to go to that party, and Hughes takes you there. Whether she intended it or not, her Helen magnum opus would be served best over a bottle of wine and a group of chatty nerds. While reading I found myself looking up a lot of paintings I had never seen and re-reading plays I hadn’t touched in decades.
My first rabbit trail was a quote on the top of page eight from Euripides, and I immediately stopped and read Medea and Other Plays from the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series. Translated by James Morwood, the collection highlights the flaws and follies of Grecian women in mythology and includes the plays Medea, Hippolytus, Elektra, and of course, Helen. I had read Medea before and knew about the Lilith/Lamia fashioned child-killer, but Euripides’s depiction of Helen of Troy was new to me. In this version, the adulteress of Troy is presented as a more palatable character who was squirreled away in Egypt for an entire decade long war and was never with Paris at all. The Helen we see in Troy was a phantom Helen created by the gods, and is a victim of circumstance.
Hughes pulls out every myth, legend, play, painting, poem, and tapestry ever known throughout history and discusses them thoroughly. She talks about the things most culturally literate people know off hand and things that only die-hard ancient literature or history buffs have researched. Sometimes treating Helen like a real person, the book takes on a biographical form. Sometimes Hughes detours into fictional fandom and muses on possibilities with whimsy. At all times I can picture Pies’s fictional party spitballing ideas about Helen of Troy, gossiping like pick-a-little-ladies and debating like Mensa meeting attendees.
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Anakalian Whims 