Education in coketown is a process by which innocence and imagination are rooted out of the children so they will grow up into soulless Human Beings who know nothing but fact. Dickens is a master at using overstatement to make a point, but the coketown schoolroom is drawn form fact than fancy. It is based on a type of schooling referred to either as the Monitorial System or as the Lancastrian System after its originator, a London teacher named Joseph Lancaster.
The story starts with a capital letter to make it important ‘‘Now what I want is Facts. teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. ‘It was first published as a serial in a magazine, beginning in 1854.
Hard Times opens with a comic yet frightening lecture on the purpose on the purpose of education.Significantly, the speech is not made by the schoolmaster, but by a businessman who underlines each point on the school master’s sleeve, giving the impression that he is lecturing the instructor more than the pupils.
The schoolmaster himself is insignificant, a worker whose job is to mould the students to the specifications of the industrialist in this factory-like school.
‘‘The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels, then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.’’
The image of the students as vessels to be filled makes it clear that they are expected to be passive receptacles of ‘‘Facts poured into them until they were full to the brim’’ rather than active learners.
The title of this chapter (2)’’Murdering the Innocents’’ is is a harsh statement of this soulless, fact-based system of education. The children are not being killed bodily; their bodies will be needed to toil in the factories. Only the innocent part of them is being murdered, so that innocence and imagination never get in the way of the way of their imagination never get in the way of their acceptance of the harsh realities of the dreary lives they are soon to face.
Dickens loves to give his characters the names they deserve. The term ‘‘gradgrind’’refers to a student who grinds out his schoolwork diligently but mindlessly, Mr M’choakumchild’ his name sounds like he’ll choke the children with learning it’s a very clever name and a metaphor.
Dickens also creates Sissy’s Jupe name as an elegant girl and Bitzer as an inhuman and unnatural. Dickens also criticizes the Gradgrind philosophy of ‘Fact, Fact, and Fact.
There is no pleasure found in fancy or imagination according to Mr Gradgrind, and Gradgrind drills this into his students and children. And a student of Gradgrind’s(Bitzer)shows the coldness of fact,fact,fact in such terms Mr Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms no doubt substituting the words ‘’boys and girls’’ for ‘’sir’’.
‘‘Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts. Dickens is trying to make us also aware of the differences in how the pupils are treated ‘‘Girl number twenty; said Gradgrind squarely pointing with his square finger’’.
‘‘Sissy Jupe, sir explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.’’
Sissy Jupe’s father is part of the travelling circus in town for a short while.’’Sissy is not a name’’ obviously, Gradgrind hates everything the circus stands for, he advises Sissy to call herself Cecelia. and to refer her father as a ‘‘farrier’’ (The person who shoes a horse) or perhaps a ‘‘veterinary surgeon’’.Sissy Jupe is a slow learner, among the group of stragglers, who admit that they would dare to carpet a room with representation of flowers because she is ‘’fond of them’’.Sissy is taught that she must not ‘’fancy’’ and that she is ‘’to be in all things regulated and governed by fact’’.
In my conclusion I think Dickens makes me (us) aware of his views about education he uses the way pupils are treated in the classroom eg.boys and girls sit separately, also the teachers know the boys names but not the girls and Dickens also uses a lot of metaphors and repetition to engage the reader and also make the reader have sympathy for the characters (Sissy Jupe) and disgust for Mr Gradgrind and a lot of sarcasm for Mr M’choakumchild
