The Veldt Essay

Bradbury’s Evidence on the Impact of Technology
The short story “The Veldt” is about a family that lives in an automated house called "The Happylife Home," filled with machines that do everything for them from cooking meals, to clothing them, to rocking them to sleep. The two children, Peter and Wendy adore the “nursery” as they can teleport to wherever they imagine. Parents, George and Lydia, come to a realization that their way of life is not so perfect after all and worry about their children’s wellbeing and decide to contact a psychologist. The psychologist, David McClean, suggests they turn off the house, move away to the country, and learn to be more self-sufficient. The children, completely reliant on the nursery, beg their parents to let them have one last visit in Africa to see the lions and the parents agree to let them spend one more minute there. When they return to the nursery to get the children, the children lock them in from the outside so they get stuck inside with the lions and get eaten. When David comes by to look for George and Lydia, he finds the children enjoying lunch on the veldt and sees the lions eating something in the distance. Bradbury is foreshadowing the fact that if people become too dependent on technology that it could potentially act as a disadvantage and “kill” society metaphorically. Some things are just not meant to be innovated and sometimes sticking to the old way of doing things is truly the right way. By becoming so dependent on technology it is a tendency to
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become lazy, it does all the work for us, for example; the nature of children is to learn by example. They are simply shown by their parents to rely on the house because of its capabilities, and have instead turned to the nursery because it has helped their minds to grow. Their parents have become failures for not providing that proper loving, nurturing and supportive environment that children should be raised in. As technology has been advancing the overall family unit has been struggling, suddenly more than ever families now lack the communication and socialization that they used to. To most parents it seems like an easy route to stick their kids in front of the TV all day so they are quiet and are out of the way, but what those parents need to realize is that a TV is not a parent and should not act as one. Every family needs understanding and communication to be successful and that is something that cannot be taught to anyone with any piece of technology, it is learned through learning and experiencing. Bradbury is warning future societies that by letting technology control their lives no good can come from it, as technology advances so should society but it should never become a thing of overall dependency, humans were born with such high intellect for a reason.