Education Week

Lois Lowry's dedication for her novel, The Giver, winner of the 1994 Newberry Medal, reads: 

For all the children
To whom we entrust the future 

A major theme of the book, as many a middle school reader discovers, is the significance of memory to the human experience. In this early dystopian classic, the central character, Jonas, becomes Receiver of Memory, selected as a nineteen-year-old to procure, from the community's one elder Receiver of Memory, all forgotten history and past experience...