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Time is a website and magazine that talks about world views, government, and education. America is trying to improve itself just like the government in The Giver improved themselves.

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6 Ways the Next President Can Improve Education

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Here are six policy recommendations for the next president to boost opportunity and help make the American Dream a reality

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Lois Lowry has a website, and here it is.

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this website has a few things about government that is similar to the government in The Giver.

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This is a funny video where a kid reenacts The Giver.

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Lois Lowry explains her book. It was not meant to be science fiction, but realistic fiction.

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The Giver is now a movie.

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The Giver - Official Trailer - The Weinstein Company

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This article is written by a blogger who chose to read The Giver, this is his take on it.

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By Aaron Tao * Thursday September 18, 2014 11:25 AM PDT *

" Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all." -Lois Lowry

Last month, I had the pleasure of reading and seeing its recent film adaptation. After hearing many of my friends rave about the book, I decided to read it myself (for some reason, I was never assigned this book during my grade school years). I was not disappointed. Despite being a children's novel, The Giver deals with many mature themes and offers a deep, thought-provoking commentary on politics and society.

The Giver presents us with a world where war, poverty, crime, suffering, and bigotry have been completely eliminated. In this utopian Community, people strive to maintain "Sameness" where everyone and everything is equal and same. But the reader quickly perceives something is wrong with this supposedly perfect society. Memories of basic human emotions such love, hate, and empathy have been completely suppressed in the populace; and defining cultural features including art, music, literature, and even color, have also been completely erased. Both the best and the worst aspects of humanity are instead stored within the mind of the titular character, the Giver. As the Giver explains to the protagonist Jonas in the novel:

Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with difference. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

Despite taking liberties with the novel, the film adaptation made graceful use of black-and-white cinematography to showcase a colorless dystopian world and slowly transitioned to full color as Jonas gradually learns the truth about his society and its past. Most of all, the main theme of the inspiring individual struggling against the all-powerful State was not lost in the film. After Jonas was selected to be the new Receiver, he realized the vast social cost that had to be paid for his Community to achieve perfection and "Sameness."

To maintain this environment of total security and equality, a council of Elders regiments people's lifestyles down to the last detail to prevent them from making the "wrong choices." Everything from a person's permanent profession to one's intimate spouse is planned and assigned by the State. In addition, social norms have been so successfully programmed into the populace that it is, as Jonas instinctively understands, "considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals." Absolute equality was finally achieved, but at the heavy price of individual humanity.

Despite being a dramatic depiction in a fictional dystopia, this vision of "equality" has adherents in the real world.

In his classic work, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell observes that in political discourse, participants often seem to be arguing not so much against each other, but past each other: "Whatever one's vision, other visions are easily misunderstood-not only because of caricatures produced by polemics but also because the very words used ('equality,' 'freedom,' 'justice,' 'power') mean entirely different things in the context of different presuppositions."

In other words, a person argues not against another's opposing worldview but against what he or she perceives those positions to be, which is drastically different from the actual positions held. For example, take the celebrated ideal of "equality." When Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," he certainly did not mean to say that all men are clones. Rather, this statement is consistent with the classical liberal notion that all men are equal before the law, and that every person ought to be treated as a unique individual, and not prejudged by the collective statistics of any particular group that he or she may belong to due to accident of birth. Although Jefferson was arguably the most egalitarian of all the Founders, he recognized "a natural aristocracy among men.... ground[ed in] virtue and talents" that can foster a merit-based society. Other Founders, such as Hamilton, took an even more "constrained" view of human nature that saw man as deeply flawed. Typically, they were deeply suspicious of attempts to completely remake society in accordance with lofty-sounding ideals-for example, those that animated the French Revolution.

In contrast, to thinkers who adhere to a utopian or "unconstrained" vision, as Sowell puts it, equality is perceived as a " result characteristic.... To them, equality of opportunity means equalized probabilities of achieving the given results, whether education, employment or the courtroom." To those who hold the "unconstrained" vision, "it is the material conditions of life which are to be equalized under the influence or power of those with the intellectual and moral standing to make the well-being of others their special concern." Prominent names such as William Godwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and George Bernard Shaw promoted this "unconstrained" vision with fervor, believing that man can perfect himself and society, and eradicate social ills through reason and political will, all in the name of the "greater good."

As The Giver and the melancholy lessons of history vividly illustrate, coercive efforts to perfect humanity end up diminishing our humanity and often result in hell on earth. In The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek gave the benefit of doubt to many of his ideological adversaries and acknowledged that they did have the best interests of humanity at heart. But because these democratic central planners are driven by noble ideals, they lack the ruthlessness to carry out the reality of their vision. In their zeal to reorganize and remake society to reach that utopia, they weaken the restraints on the exercise of arbitrary power and pave the way for the " worst to get on top." In the quest for utopia, Hayek warns that "we shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes." Hayek promoted his alternative to a planned society by elaborating on classical liberal principles and defending the case for freedom in his other seminal work The Constitution of Liberty:

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. If we knew how freedom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear. We shall never get the benefits of freedom, never obtain those unforeseeable new developments for which it provides the opportunity, if it is not also granted where the uses made of it by some do not seem desirable. It is therefore no argument against individual freedom that it is frequently abused. Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like. Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

In other words, a free society should preserve and respect individual choice in all areas of human activity, and would stand in stark contrast to the dystopia of The Giver and the desires of today's would-be totalitarians. Only in the former can self-reliant, freethinking individuals prosper and achieve the apex of humanity.

Dystopian literature, including , The Hunger Games Trilogy, and the Divergent Series, seems to be all the rage among Millennials these days. With broad anti-collectivist themes running through these popular series, it is easy to understand why at least one left-wing critic is worried. Young-adult fiction has the potential to reach wider audiences than half-century old economic treatises. As long as more people become skeptical of authority and think more about the proper relationship between the individual and State, I cheer on the growing trend of libertarian themes in pop culture.

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The Giver's Dystopia: Total Equality and No Humanity - Aaron Tao

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'Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of The Giver: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of

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This is an article written by someone who has read the book and giving her insight on it.

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The Giver

The Giver has recently been made into a film, and so, with the suggestion of one of my bookish friends, I picked the book up to see what the story was like, and wasn't disappointed in the slightest.

The Giver is a morally driven and interesting story about a young boy called Jonas who lives in a society free of crime and sadness. At the age of 12, children are assigned their jobs, which they will train for and do for the rest of their lives. Everything is chosen; from your parents to your partner. Jonas stands apart from the community when he is chosen to become the new "Memory Keeper". Society has been kept free of all the negative aspects of life because for as long as it has been formed, there has been someone who holds all the bad and good memories of the past within them. This is both bad and good for the inhabitants because, although they are protected from harm, they are also not exposed to the wonderful aspects of life.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because, even though it is supposed to be more of a children's book than young adult, the storyline is complex enough to hold the attention of older readers. I really enjoyed Jonas as a character because his character development from a scared boy, to someone willing to risk his future to save the community, is enjoyable to follow. This book shows the path of growing up; at first we are scared to accept that there are new responsibilities, but as we slowly get used to it we want to move more and more away from childhood.

Throughout the book, Jonas' loss of trust in his parents is also important in communicating the morals of the story. At the beginning, when Jonas is a normal child in the community, he trusts his parents completely as is expected. However, after The Giver shows Jonas the tape of his Father "releasing" a new born child, a process in which the child is killed and disposed of, Jonas ultimately loses his trust and admiration of his father. This moment is what forces Jonas to leave the community, even before The Giver has planned for him to. I enjoyed this transition in Jonas because he begins to defy the life which is set out for him. It is symbolic of the change from the innocent mind of a child into the questioning and educated mind of an adult.

The ambiguity of the ending is also another aspect which makes this book interesting to read. There are two possible meanings behind the ending; either Jonas and Gabriel freeze to death together on the sled, or they have really found "Elsewhere". Ultimately, the ending still shows us that, whatever happens, Jonas has made choices for himself rather than being told what to do. Whatever happens to him, it is still better than his life in the community would ever have been.

The community is a metaphor for restriction and censoring; it limits the choices of an individual until they have none left, removing joy from life. By leaving the community Jonas has already made an individual choice, and this demonstrates to the reader that it is better to live your life the way you would like to, than be held back by others and never really be happy. I think this is an important message for children and young adults today, as experiences such as bullying in schools limit people from being themselves.

This book was easily read in a couple of hours because of its simple but gripping storyline and its interesting characters. The Giver was so powerful because it's one of a rare few young adult books which leaves the ending up to you. The ending of The Giver is powerful because we have a choice in what it means; just as Jonas made a sacrificial choice for the good of the community, you have to decide for yourself too.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves dystopian worlds, and well as people who like a book to let them think for themselves!
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Laurenthereader: 'The ending of The Giver is powerful because we have a choice in what it means'

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This is an article of an interview where Lois Lowry talks about her book and how she got the idea for it.

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Just for a second, imagine a world without war, conflict or grief. Refreshing, right? But it's also a world without memory, at least in the premise of Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver. The movie adaptation opened this week and stars Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges.

The Giver swept up nearly every prestigious prize for young adult literature, including the Newbery Medal and the William Allen White Award. It's assigned reading in thousands of schools. Lowry came up with the idea of a scary, sterile world where nearly everyone takes drugs to suppress their memories and emotions after her father was put in a nursing home.

"He didn't have Alzheimer's, but he began to lose pieces of his memory, the way people do as they age," she recalls. One day, she showed her father a photo of her sister, who died at the age of 28.

"And he said, 'I can't remember her name,' and I told him her name," she says. "And he said, 'Whatever happened to her?' And I had to tell him about her death."

Like so many who've suffered the pain of losing someone, Lowry considered - just passingly - how much better our existences might be if we didn't have memories at all.

"And so I began to think about writing a book about people who had found a way to manipulate human memory, so they wouldn't have to remember anything bad," she explains.

Lowry has written more than 40 books for kids and young adults, ranging from a historical novel about the Holocaust ( Number the Stars) to a rollicking series about a suburban preteen and her family (the Anastasia Krupnik books) to a fictionalized account of her sister's passing ( A Summer to Die). Many have been wildly popular, but The Giver has been Lowry's greatest success. It's sold more than 12 million copies and has been adapted into a play, a musical and an opera.

That's not to say that writing the movie version was easy.

"It was extremely intimidating," admits Michael Mitnick, who's co-credited for the script. "I think I did about 87 drafts of the screenplay."

Mitnick read The Giver as a fifth-grader. Now he's 30, but it's still one of his favorites, he says, for its spare but haunting language - and the questions it raises for young readers.

"Would I prefer a world where there isn't war and there isn't starvation and greed and envy?" he asks. "Or would I instead believe that with the good there comes the bad - and there always has to be both sides of it?"

The Giver includes controversial topics such as euthanasia, and that made Walden Media, which bought the rights to the book early on, at first hesitant to make the movie. "Because it had been banned in some places," explains executive Chip Flaherty.

But then came The Hunger Games. Suddenly, a dystopian fantasy with a built-in following of millions of readers seemed like a worthy risk. Some critics credit The Giver with kicking off the entire dystopian YA trend, but Lowry immediately dismisses the notion.

"I didn't think of it as futuristic or dystopian or science fiction or fantasy," she protests.

Instead, she says, it was just a story like so many of her other ones, about a kid making sense of a complicated world. As the child of an Army officer, Lowry moved all over the globe - often after the school year had started.

"So I would be thrust into classrooms as the new kid," she explains. That made her hypervigilant about recognizing subtle differences between the rules of each new place. For instance, in one school, the girls might wear their socks artfully scrunched down.

"And then you'd be in the next place and the socks were carefully folded over," she laughs. "And it was important to know that. So I would observe those things."

In retrospect, it was perfect training for a writer, Lowry says. She refuses to say what she's working on now - besides her garden, at her renovated farmhouse in Maine. "As female hormones decrease, they're replaced with an overwhelming urge to grow delphinium," she cracks.

At 77, Lois Lowry says it was worth the 18 years it took to see The Giver transferred to the big screen. And she hopes it won't take quite as long to see the three other books in The Giver series become movies, too.

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Lois Lowry Says 'The Giver' Was Inspired By Her Father's Memory Loss

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Just for a second, imagine a world without war, conflict or grief. Refreshing, right? But it's also a world without memory, at least in the premise of Lois Lowry's 1993 novel The Giver. The movie adaptation opened this week and stars Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges.

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Jonas and his friends:(left to right) Asher, Fiona, and Jonas

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Jonas and his friends:(left to right) Asher, Fiona, and Jonas

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Jonas had to prepare to be cutoff from his friends.

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Everyone lives in a community where there are laws and no one can see color

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This is an award winning book and now is a movie.