Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. How do you think people 50-75 years ago would feel if they were suddenly dropped into our world? What would shock them about our technology and entertainment?

Teaching Suggestion: To help students understand the strange world of Fahrenheit 451, explain how people in the 1950s had a lot of hesitancy about technology. Bradbury’s predictions about TV screens covering all four walls of a room or sea shells playing audio into someone’s ears as they fall asleep might have seemed ludicrous at the time, but the ideas were nevertheless recognizable as extrapolations of 1950s fears and attitudes about the era’s technological innovations and trends. Understanding this context helps us better understand where Bradbury was coming from in imagining a technology-obsessed future.

• The educational website 20th Century History Song Book includes a brief essay explaining the mass consumption of television in midcentury America and why many feared for the future of American culture.
• This ScreenRant article identifies various ways in which predictions in the 1985 movie Back to the Future II about what would happen in 25 years turned out to be wrong.