The Fun They Had

Isaac Asimov sets The Fun They Had far in the future. The first thing the reader is given is not a classroom but a page of a diary. Margie, who is eleven, writes one short excited line — Today Tommy found a real book! — on a page headed 17 May 2157. That single sentence does a great deal of work. It tells us the year, it tells us who is quietly telling the story to herself, and it tells us that in this world an ordinary printed book is rare enough to be worth recording.

Tommy is thirteen and a little proud of knowing more than Margie. He has found the book in the attic of his house. The two children turn its pages together, and everything about it strikes them as odd. The paper has gone yellow and crinkly with age, and the words simply sit there. They are used to text that appears and refreshes on a screen, so print that refuses to move feels to them like a fault rather than a feature. Tommy, who likes to sound worldly, adds a practical complaint: once you have finished a printed book you throw it away, whereas his television screen has already held a million books and is good for plenty more.

The book turns out to be about school, and Margie is scornful, because school is the thing she hates most in the world. Asimov then steps backwards for a few paragraphs to explain why. Margie's school is a room in her own house, right beside her bedroom, and her teacher is a machine — a large, black, ugly cabinet with a big screen that shows the lessons and asks the questions, and a slot into which homework and test papers must be dropped. She has to write those answers in a punch code that she was made to learn when she was six years old.

Recently the machine had been giving her one geography test after another and her marks had been falling steadily. Her mother sent for the County Inspector. He arrived with a whole box of tools full of dials and wires, took the mechanical teacher apart, and — to Margie's disappointment, because she had been hoping the thing could never be put together again — reassembled it within about an hour. His diagnosis was mechanical rather than human. The geography part of the machine had been geared to run too quick for a child of her age; he slowed it to an average ten-year-old level and told her mother that the overall pattern of her progress was quite satisfactory.

Back in the present of the story, Tommy explains what his book says about the schools of the past. There was a separate building that all the children of the neighbourhood went to. Children of the same age were taught the same things at the same time. And the teacher was a human being. Margie is fascinated, and argues only because her mother has taught her that a teacher must be adjusted to fit the mind of each individual child. Tommy tells her bluntly that this is not how it was done then, and that she need not read the book if she does not like it. Margie's reply gives her away: she had never said she disliked it.

Then her mother calls her, because lessons happen at regular hours. The machine is already waiting with an arithmetic lesson on the addition of proper fractions, and a demand that yesterday's homework be inserted in the proper slot. Margie obeys with a sigh and sits down in her schoolroom. Her mind, however, has gone somewhere else entirely — to a schoolyard full of children arriving together and going home together, shouting and laughing, sitting in one room and helping one another with the sums. She is thinking about the fun they had.

Asimov is careful to make the mechanical teacher sound impressive and unpleasant at the same time. It is described as large and black and ugly, with a big screen on which all the lessons are shown and all the questions are asked. Below the screen there is a slot. Homework and test papers go into that slot, and the marks come back almost at once. There is nothing wrong with the machine considered purely as a machine: it is fast, patient, tireless, never unfair, and matched exactly to the child in front of it. That is precisely the problem the story wants us to feel.

Look at where the school is. It is a room in Margie's own house, next to her bedroom. She does not travel to it, she meets nobody there, and she does not leave it at the end of the day. School has been folded into the house until the two are the same place. Her mother's insistence on fixed hours is the only thing keeping the idea of a school day alive at all, because without regular times the lessons would blur into everything else that happens indoors. That detail is easy to skip over, but it is one of Asimov's sharpest: a school with no other children in it needs a rule to make it feel like a school.

The punch code is another quiet horror. Margie's answers have to be written in a code she was drilled in at the age of six, a code designed for the machine's convenience rather than the child's. Being taught to communicate in a form that the reader cannot even picture is the story's way of showing how far the machine's needs have pushed aside the child's. Learning has become something you feed into a slot.

The episode with the County Inspector is where the criticism becomes visible. Margie has been sliding in geography, test after test, and the response of the adults is not a conversation but a repair. The inspector arrives with a box of tools full of dials and wires. He takes the teacher apart while Margie watches, and her hope during that hour tells us everything about her feelings: she wants him to fail, so that the machine will have to be carried away. He does not fail. Within about an hour the cabinet is whole again, and the verdict is delivered in the language of engineering. The geography sector had been geared too quick for her; he slows it to an average ten-year-old level; the overall pattern of her progress, he reports, is quite satisfactory.

Notice what nobody asks. Nobody asks Margie whether she is bored, or lonely, or frightened of tests, or simply tired of doing everything alone in a room beside her bedroom. A falling graph is read as a settings error, and the fix is a setting. Tommy's machine has already been through something similar: its history sector blanked out completely and the whole teacher was taken away for nearly a month, which he remembers as a stroke of luck rather than a loss. In both households the teacher is equipment, to be serviced and replaced. The word teacher has quietly changed its meaning, and Asimov never has to say so out loud.

The book that Tommy carries down from the attic is old enough for Margie's own family history to be involved. She remembers that her grandfather once told her that when he was a little boy his grandfather had spoken of a time when every story was printed on paper. Asimov has stacked three generations between Margie and printed books, which is a neat way of measuring how long ago the change happened without supplying a single date.

What the children notice about the book is entirely physical. The pages are yellow and crinkly. The words stand still. The narrator slips in a small aside — on a screen, you know — as though explaining to somebody who might not have followed, and that aside is really Margie's own voice leaking into the narration. For her, moving text is normal and still text is the oddity. Readers in our own century feel the shock the other way round, and that reversal is the joke Asimov is playing on us.

Their reactions differ, and the difference is worth noticing. Margie is struck by the strangeness of the object. Tommy, older and keen to sound experienced, is struck by its inefficiency. A printed book, he argues, is used up once you have read it, while his screen holds a million books and can hold plenty more. He is not wrong, and Asimov does not make him look foolish for saying it. This story is not a simple attack on technology; it is an argument about what efficiency quietly leaves out.

Then the subject of the book changes the conversation. It is about school, and Margie's first reaction is contempt, because she hates school. But as Tommy reads on, three facts unsettle her. The first is that the school was a separate building and all the children of the area went to it. The second is that children of one age group were taught the same things at the same time. The third, and to Margie the strangest of all, is that the teacher was a person.

She resists that last point hardest. A man, she objects, could not possibly know as much as a teacher. Tommy insists that he could, and offers his own father as proof. The exchange is funny and sad at once. Margie has been raised to believe that only a machine holds enough knowledge to teach, and Tommy defends human beings by measuring one of them against a machine, because that is the only scale either child has.

Her second objection is the one she has learnt at home. Her mother has told her that a teacher must be adjusted to fit the mind of each individual boy and girl, and that every child must therefore be taught differently. A class in which everyone studies the same thing at the same moment sounds wrong to her for that reason. Tommy's answer is flat: that is simply not how it was done then, and if she does not like it she need not read the book. Margie's reply is the giveaway of the whole story. She had not said she disliked it. She is arguing against the old school with her mouth while wanting it with everything else in her, and Asimov lets that contradiction sit on the page without comment.

Margie. Margie is eleven, and Asimov builds her almost entirely out of small reactions rather than description. She is curious: she writes the diary entry, she crowds in to look at the book, she keeps asking about the old school even while objecting to it. She is honest about her feelings in private and defensive in company, calling school hateful to Tommy one moment and defending her own system the next. She is also lonely in a way she cannot name, because she has nothing to compare her life with. Her loneliness only becomes visible to her once the book hands her a picture of the alternative. By the end she is not rebellious — she goes to her arithmetic lesson when she is called. What has changed is that she now has somewhere else to be inside her head.

Tommy. Tommy is thirteen and thoroughly enjoys the two years he has over Margie. He is the one who finds the book, reads ahead of her, and hands out information with a superior air. He tells her the old schools existed hundreds and hundreds of years ago, corrects her about the teacher being a man, and informs her that she need not read the book if it displeases her. Underneath the swagger he is generous. He shares the find, answers her questions, and leaves the door open when she asks whether she may read more with him later, saying maybe as he walks off whistling with the dusty old book tucked under his arm. The nonchalance is a boy's performance, and Asimov catches it exactly.

Margie's mother. She never becomes a full character, and that is deliberate. She appears whenever something must be enforced or arranged: she sends for the inspector when the marks fall, she insists that lessons happen at regular hours, and she calls Margie to the schoolroom at the end. She holds views about education — that teaching must be fitted to each individual mind — but they are the official views of her world, repeated rather than examined. She is not unkind or foolish. She is simply somebody who has stopped noticing what her daughter's school is missing, which is a far more ordinary and far more troubling thing to be.

The County Inspector. He is the only outsider who enters the house in the whole story, and he is a repairman. He is pleasant to Margie, he works quickly, and he solves the exact problem he was called to solve. His importance lies in what he does not do. He does not talk to Margie about geography. He does not ask why she dreads tests or what she does all day by herself. In a world where the teacher is a machine, the person who arrives when learning goes wrong is a technician, and everybody finds that perfectly natural.

The mechanical teacher. It has no personality at all, yet it functions as the antagonist of the story. It sets the day's work, marks it instantly, demands homework through a slot, and is described in words normally kept for something unpleasant to look at. It cannot be argued with, cannot be charmed, cannot be disappointed, and cannot be missed when it is gone — Tommy's memory of his own machine's month-long absence is cheerful. That last detail is the strongest judgement the story passes on it. A teacher whose absence is a holiday was never quite a teacher.

What is lost when learning stops being shared. The central claim of the story is not that machines teach badly. Margie's machine teaches efficiently, adjusts to her level, marks her instantly and never loses its temper. What it cannot supply is company. In the school Tommy reads about, the children travel there together, sit together, learn the same lesson at the same moment and therefore have something to talk about afterwards. They can help one another with the homework, which means that explaining is itself part of learning. Margie has none of that. Every advantage her system offers is individual, and every single thing it has removed was social.

Nostalgia for something never experienced. Margie longs for a past that is not hers. She has never sat in a classroom, never waited at a gate, never been teased or helped by a classmate. Her picture of the old school is built entirely out of a book that Tommy read aloud to her, and it is almost certainly rosier than the reality ever was, because real classrooms also contain boredom, unfairness and bad days. Asimov knows this perfectly well and does not correct her, because the point is not whether her picture is accurate. The point is what the longing reveals. A child who imagines an unknown past as paradise is telling you something about the present she actually knows.

Efficiency set against experience. The world of 2157 has optimised education thoroughly. The journey to school is gone, the timetable is personal, no minute is wasted on a lesson a particular child does not need. Every one of those improvements also deletes an encounter with another human being. The story asks a question worth carrying out of the classroom: can a system be improved so far that it stops doing the thing it was built for?

Technology is not the enemy; thoughtlessness is. Tommy's argument for the screen is perfectly sound on its own terms, and Asimov, who wrote about robots with genuine affection for most of his life, is not writing a protest against machinery. The failure in this story belongs to the adults. They accepted a new system without ever asking what the old one had been providing, and now, faced with an unhappy child, they call a mechanic.

The title. Every word of The Fun They Had is doing quiet work. They are other people, children long dead, whom Margie can never meet. Had places the enjoyment firmly in a finished past, not in anything she could join. And fun is the last word anyone would attach to school in this story, since Margie's own lessons produce only sighs and falling geography marks. The title therefore belongs to Margie's imagination rather than to her life. It names something that exists purely as longing, which is why the story can end on it and feel complete even though nothing has actually happened.

Reading the ending. Margie feeds yesterday's homework into the slot and the screen announces an arithmetic lesson on the addition of proper fractions. It is a small, dull, entirely ordinary task, and it is set directly against a daydream of a crowded schoolyard. Asimov places the flattest possible present beside the warmest possible imagined past and lets the gap between them do all the arguing for him. No character makes a speech, and none is needed.

Point of view. The story is told in the third person, but almost everything reaches us through Margie. We learn what she notices, hopes and dreads, and we are never taken inside Tommy or her mother. This matters when you write answers. Statements about how school feels are Margie's feelings, not the author's opinions, and you should phrase them that way.

Keep track of whose words are whose. There are three sources and they are easy to confuse. The narrator supplies description: the look of the mechanical teacher, the state of the pages, the lesson waiting on the screen. Tommy supplies the information about old schools, and he is a thirteen-year-old repeating what he has just read, so his account is second-hand and may be simplified. Margie's mother supplies the belief that a teacher must be fitted to each individual mind. A common mistake in answers is to credit Tommy's opinions to Asimov himself. Asimov arranged those opinions; he did not sign them.

A child's vocabulary inside the narration. Watch for the moments where the narrator's language slides into Margie's, such as the aside that words ought to be moving, on a screen, you know. Reporting a character's thoughts in something close to her own words while still writing he or she is called free indirect speech. It is the reason the story reads like a child's report even though no child is narrating it.

Science fiction detail used sparingly. Asimov gives us remarkably little futuristic hardware: a screen, a slot, a punch code, sectors inside a teaching machine, and an inspector with dials and wires. He tells us nothing about the cities, the transport, the food or the politics of 2157. Everything invented exists to make one point about schooling, which is why such a short story can carry so large an idea. If you are asked why the story is called science fiction, this is the answer to give — the future setting is a tool for examining the present, not a display of gadgets.

Irony. The whole piece runs on it. A child living in the age of perfect teaching machines wants a plain classroom instead. A book about school, the one subject she despises, is the thing that makes her want school. The adults summon an inspector to fix a machine when the unhappiness is in the child standing next to it. Naming the irony and then showing both of its halves is the quickest way to turn a summary into an analysis.

Writing your answers. Begin by placing the moment: who is speaking, and where in the story it happens. Then say what it means. Then, if the question asks for it, connect it to the theme of learning together. Paraphrase the story rather than copying long stretches of it, and use the text's exact words only when you are commenting on that exact phrasing, keeping such quotations down to a few words. For an opinion question, take a clear position in your first line and support it with two specific details from the story rather than one general statement.