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foldr 3 hours ago

That's a non sequitur. But you see, this is the exactly kind of thing that a high school literature class could usefully dig into.

We know that Orwell was thinking of the Russian Revolution when he wrote the book. Many events in the story have obvious historical parallels to it.

On the other hand, Orwell was also a political journalist who wrote political essays. If his primary aim in writing the book was to make a specific critique of communism, why did he decide to express that critique as a work of fiction with talking animals? He would certainly have been aware that such a work is inherently open to wider interpretation.

Do you really think that a class of reasonably intelligent high school students couldn't find any moral in the story that's not inherently tied to communism? There are clearly all sorts of analogies that can be drawn between the story and historical or current events. And there are all sorts of conclusions you can draw. Maybe the animals should never have had a revolution in the first place; maybe they should have, but they went about it the wrong way, etc. etc.