Utopian Manifesto

James Benton, English and Writing

This term, I had my students working in small committees to create a utopian manifesto in which they enumerated a set of values, then created a set of rules and systems to support those values.  They had to first consider utopian thinking, then consider the manifesto as a genre.  This involved researching utopian experiments from the past, reading manifestos like our declaration of independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Port Huron Statement, and the Black Panther Party statement, “What We Believe and What We Want.”  Students quickly had to make the distinction between hollow platitudes like “freedom” and the concrete mechanisms needed to support their core values.  They ended up realizing before long that designing a society is not so simple, and they were forced to research issues like immigration, defense, education, health care, and justice. They certainly know more than what they did ten weeks ago.  

They also confronted the need to express themselves in writing with clarity and precision and gained an appreciation for paragraphing, transitions (the relationships between ideas in the orderly sequence of ideas), and a little bit about document design conventions.  All in all, my WR 121 students definitely learned a lot, whether they realize it or not.  So did I.