The Fun They Had

The Fun they had
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“The Fun They Had” is a short story by Isaac Asimov, in which the subject of the story is the “school education”.
In this piece, we have a conversation between a 13-year-old boy called Tommy and her 11-year-old sister Margie about school as the little boy finds a very old book that described how school was at his grandfather’s times. The two children compare the “future education” in the year 2155 which concerns home schooling, teacher robots and technological books, to the “old” one their grandfather was given with human teacher, special school buildings and paper books.

A third-person narrator, mainly through direct speeches and brief descriptions, narrates the story.
The events are organized in chronological order and it’s given prominence mainly to the description of the school and the questioning of it.
The point of view adopted is the narrator’s but we can see that he tries to merge with his also Margie’s point of view, indirectly.
The two main characters are Margie and his brother Tommy, both described through interaction but they remain flat characters, as they are not deeply described in terms of physical aspect.
In the language used, we can find the use of irony, for example in the case in which the narrator describes the book as “awfully funny to read words”.

The setting of time, which in this case is May 17, 2155, gives a big contribute for understanding the story: the kids live in the future and they read a book about how schools were centuries before.
In addition, the title is relevant to the meaning of the story: Margie thinks about the two kinds of school and thinks how much fun kids should have had at school together which indirectly express her interest for that kind of education and we can find a sense of irony in this.