27 pages • 54 minutes read
The Fun They Had
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Symbols & Motifs
The Book
The dominant symbol in “The Fun They Had” is the book that Tommy finds in his attic, representing key ideas about technology, education, and social connection. To Margie and Tommy, the book is an outdated form of technology that strikes them as both funny and compelling compared to their singular experiences with reading and learning from computers. The book represents a new set of possibilities for storing and accessing knowledge that is integral to Margie’s paradigm shift throughout the story. Further, it represents an educational tool that encourages human connection and socialization rather than preventing it. This is accomplished through the book’s subject matter about the days in which school took place in a schoolhouse with groups of children and human rather than mechanical teachers.
Additionally, the book provides an opportunity for the children to share interests and experience the book together. For Margie, the book is the symbol of a society and model of education that meets her needs for connection. The book’s depiction of past educational practices incentivizes her to learn in a way that the mechanical teacher completely fails to accomplish.
The Apple
When Margie fails to perform well in geography on the mechanical teacher, her mother calls the County Inspector to modify the machine. As part of this process, he gives Margie an apple. The apple is commonly associated with education in the 20th century as the standard gift a student would present to a teacher. In “The Fun They Had,” the presence of the apple foreshadows what Margie comes to learn throughout the story about how education used to look “hundreds and hundreds of years ago” (126).
The County Inspector is the closest thing in the story to an educational professional. He is not quite a teacher, but he understands how to perform maintenance on the computer and is the only person in the story who actually expresses that the mechanical teacher is not unquestionably effective. In that way, he is the only human to provide Margie with some hint of the educational support that she craves. The County Inspector ironically offers the apple to Margie, representing a gesture of respect from the teacher to the student. It is almost as if he is hinting to her that this is a ritual related to education that has now been reversed, indicating that it may be possible for things to be different again in the future as well.
The Mechanical Teacher
The mechanical teacher functions symbolically as an example of advanced technology and an exploration into the nature and purpose of education. It also represents the future (or, within the story itself, the present) and juxtaposes strongly with the symbolism of the book as a relic of the past. The contrast between these two symbols is vital for evaluating the benefits and consequences of education in the past and education as it exists in Margie’s time. Asimov does not describe the appearance of the mechanical teacher to any detailed degree beyond noting that it has “a slot where she had to put homework and test papers” and “a screen” (125-26). This lack of detail symbolically serves to communicate the lack of interest Margie feels about it and the impersonal function it serves in the story.
Unlike the book, the mechanical teacher does not fascinate Margie enough for her to bother describing it. The mechanical teacher is the source of all of Margie’s negative feelings. It is a figure irredeemably associated with boredom and failure, and she desires to avoid it more than anything. Finally, the mechanical teacher symbolizes the replacement of human support figures with technological ones that cannot meet Margie’s needs, which results in her sense of isolation and alienation.
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By Isaac Asimov
