Key Question: How does Charles Dickens show his dislike of the education system in his novel Hard Times?

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Hard Times by Charles Dickens   GCSE prose study essay    Amina Seylani

Key Question: “How does Charles Dickens show his dislike of the education system in his novel “Hard Times”?

“Hard Times” is a poignant novel, published in 1854, by Charles Dickens and set in the bleak and dreary workhouses of the Victorian era. “Hard Times” is in many ways an autobiographical novel. It is based on Dickens’ own experiences as part of a poor family whose father was in prison for debt. All of the family except for Charles were sent to a workhouse while he worked in a blacking factory in appalling conditions. Although his was a story of rags to riches following the publications of his bestselling novels, he continued to voice his concerns for social problems in Victorian British society. “Hard Times” is one of the several novels that explore the lives of the poor and working class, who, despite making up the majority of the population, had little or no say in improving their lives.

As Britain wound through the Industrial Revolution, producing machinery that had no need for manual labour resulted in hundreds of thousands migrating to the cities in the hope of finding a job- a source of livelihood. These migrants usually ended up in the workhouses, again in manual labour and almost always living in abject poverty. Their children ended up going to school with an education described in detail in the first few chapters of “Hard Times”.  In brief, the children were forced to learn facts by rote - the only principle that the Utilitarian masters considered of value. It was their belief that for children who were destined to live lives of misery in poverty, the only thing useful for them would be to become efficient workers. As a result, the children’s education followed the same monotonous, formal and mechanical process like their work in the factories. In “Hard Times”, Dickens criticises the educational system fiercely, and illustrates his dislike through a wide range of linguistic and other devices.

The first chapter named “The One Thing Needful” has little narrative content but it paints an intense dramatic picture of the harsh teaching system and the mechanical figure of the Speaker who is more of an object than a person. “Hard Times” is divided into three parts; the first part is named “Sowing”, the second “Reaping” and the third “Garnering.”  This extended metaphor is used by Dickens to introduce the “sowing” of facts as “seeds” into the fertile innocent minds of the children even though the “hard facts” seem to yield nothing. However, the Speaker is forceful as he insists on, “plant nothing else, and root out everything else,” to mould the children’s minds. The image of rooting out illustrates a forceful and painful action in the reader’s mind.  

Despite the motif of nature and plants, Dickens paints an austere and insensitive atmosphere as the scene comes into view: “a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom.” The visual imagery emphasizes Dickens’ belief that no creativity could flourish in a place so dreary.

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In this scene the Speaker is instructing the school teacher how to teach which adds to the irony and confusion. The description of the Speaker, whose character is summed up as, “inflexible, dry and dictatorial”, verges on the comical as Dickens uses repetition to emphasize the rigidity (“square”ness) of the Speaker and therefore the educational system. As the Speaker is depersonalized, the objects around him become animate including his tie, “trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp." From sowing to strangling, hard times are literally foreshadowed ahead through this unsuitable education.

Moreover, Dickens ...

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