In Junior Honors Seminar, an English course, students strengthen their critical thinking and writing skills and participate in regular in-class discussions and projects. This year’s course topic is Dystopian Literature.

Since the start of the school year, students have been applying knowledge and understanding cultivated from reading, discussing, and analyzing The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood to a collaborative discussion of a utopia. 

“Their version of a utopian society that they mapped aimed to ensure dignity to as many people as possible,” Polly Kertis, Chair of the English Department, says. “It was a way to engage their thinking in a way that made the material relevant and meaningful.”

Nolan Briggs ’26 shares that he enjoyed “talking with others about the most moral way to create a society and possible ways to actually make a genuinely good society that people haven't thought of.” 

“I don't think it's hard to create [your own society], but it's hard to spend the time to make it detailed enough to actually work,” Nolan adds. 

Also in the class, Verity Hannan ’26 says she has liked “debating logistics and ethics with my peers.” 

Polly hopes students will take away “an understanding and awareness of how dystopian literature can help us think about our current world with an eye for how to dismantle unjust systems and slow potentially destructive tendencies/systems.”

Students have also been reading shorter dystopian texts, including The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin, EPICAC and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.