What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand "becoming better" as a combined improvement process bringing persons "up from" a negative condition and "up to" a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the…

This paper discusses dehumanizing communication reified among undergraduates and lecturers. Dehumanization is the act of degrading people with respect to their best qualities and denial of humanness to others. On the other hand, communication is human interaction and learning. Communication becomes rude when it is deliberately directed resulting…

Topic 8, Our Contemporary World: Problems and Issues, in a theme issue on Teaching World History Through Science Fiction, presents this short story to motivate discussion on dehumanization, resulting in a society where the single driving force is order and unity and promptness and clocklike precision. (JB)