Dickens' Attitude towards Education in Hard Times
In the first chapter, Dickens introduces us with a glimpse of the
story, with a descriptive insight into the school and its policies. We
are not revealed the names of the characters in the opening chapter,
but it introduces the schoolmaster by mere description of character
and appearance. This, rather than introducing us by name, gives us a
close and detailed description of one of the main characters, the
schoolmaster, his views and manifestation of the school itself. This
will help us understand the schoolmaster, Mr Gradgrind, and brings us
to a clear understanding of his most important policy, a constant
motif throughout the chapters, ‘Facts’. We are also unaware of the
setting but, again introduced by appearance. This is all significant
to the story itself, as this is all a factual description, underlining
the schools factual education.
‘Now what I want is, Facts’, this is our first insight into the
school’s basic principal, Fact. The first indication we get, to the
importance of facts is that it is given a capital letter, ‘Fact’, this
gives it emphasis, signifying its value to the school’s manifesto.
‘Plant nothing else, and root out everything else…..nothing else will
ever be of any service to them’ this exemplifies the school’s
education policy in just a few words. Gradgrind bases knowledge and
understanding on mere fact, obliterating any other idea of perception.
‘A plain, bare monotonous vault of a schoolroom’, this epitomizes the
school on a whole, its lifeless and dull. As we see later on
everything, the school is lacking of colour, pupils look pale, colour
drained from their face, a reflection on the school itself, boring and
tedious. The pa...
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...his factual educational policies on his
pupils. ‘A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over’, Gradgrind sticks to the basic facts and
principle, this is essential because, as we see later on Gradgrind
demands (when asking how to describe a horse) only brief facts, to the
point, no in depth description. Gradgrind it seems, is portrayed as a
perfect, almost faultless, ‘With a rule and a pair of scales, and a
multiplication table always in his pocket’, he is never lacking
information, mathematical information or factual. The passage then
continues to say that his mentality can never be altered or hindered
‘You might hope to get some nonsensical belief into the head of George
Gradgrind or John Gradgrind………, But into the head of Thomas Gradgrind-
no, Sir’, this implicates his stubbornness towards his beliefs, and
ideas.
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"Now what I want is facts… Facts alone are wanted in life… This is the
Hard times is set in the 1840’s in the North of England. It’s set at a
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The death of God for many in the Victorian era due to scientific discoveries carried with it the implication that life is nothing more than a kind of utilitarian existence that should be lived according to logic and facts, not intuition or feeling – that without God to impose meaning on life, life is meaningless. Charles Dickens, in Hard Times, parodies this way of thought by pushing its ideologies and implications to the extreme in his depiction of the McChoakumchild School.
Mr. Gradgrind was a prominent school head that believed in “realities, facts, and calculations.” He is described as a cold-hearted man that strictly forbids the fostering of imagination and emotion, especially in his two children: Tom and Louisa (Dickens 5). Mr. Gradgrind raises his children in Coketown, a Capitalistic industrial town that Dickens calls, a waste-yard with “litter of barrels and old iron, the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, shrouded in a veil of mist and rain” (128). In this town that seems to be impenetrable to the sun’s rays, his children grow up lacking social connections, mor...
love does not exist in this world then the people who live on it will
"I must entreat you to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then" - Charles Dickens
In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens connives a theme of utilitarianism, along with education and industrialization. Utilitarianism is the belief that something is morally right if it helps a majority of people. It is a principle involving nothing but facts and leaves no room for creativity or imagination. Dickens provides symbolic examples of this utilitarianism in Hard Times by using Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the main characters in the book, who has a hard belief in utilitarianism. Thomas Gradgrind is so into his philosophy of rationality and facts that he has forced this belief into his children’s and as well as his young students. Mr. Josiah Bounderby, Thomas Gradgrind’s best friend, also studies utilitarianism, but he was more interested in power and money than in facts. Dickens uses Cecelia Jupe, daughter of a circus clown, who is the complete opposite of Thomas Gradgrind to provide a great contrast of a utilitarian belief.