What does Hard Times show about Dickens attitude towards education?

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What does “Hard Times” show about Dickens’ attitude towards education?

When Dickens wrote “Hard Times” in 1854, he aimed to highlight the social and economic pressures that many people were experiencing in the Victorian era of Britain. One of the major themes throughout the book is the idea of “Fact vs. Fancy”. Dickens uses this novel as a medium for voicing his opinions on a lot of things that were happening in Britain at the time of writing. Dickens wanted to attack the failings of the Victorian education system, which many believed to have too much emphasis on cramming the children’s minds full of facts and figures, and nor enough attention given to other aspects of their development. These ideas are broadly labelled as “utilitarianism”. It should be noted that the only educational system in the fictional town of Coketown is built upon utilitarian beliefs. One of the main characters in the novel – Mr. Gradgrind – firmly believed in utilitarianism, and opened a non-fee paying school that catered to the lower classes.

Gradgrind, being a utilitarian, takes full advantage of the school as a platform to project his utilitarian opinions upon children, in the hope that he will be able to create young adults with utilitarian beliefs. So in his school, Gradgrind makes sure that the only thing being taught to the children are facts and figures. The children in the classroom aren’t even being called by their real names; they have been given numbers by the teacher. The classroom itself is described as “a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom”. Now a vault is usually a square, bland room made usually from steel or metal and is used usually for storing money in banks. To have a classroom described as this gives the reader an accurate picture of how dull it was. All imaginative or extracurricular subjects are taken from the curriculum, and instead are replaced by subjects like mathematics, which are emphasized. But despite all of these negatives, it was an admirable thing for Gradgrind to open a school because he was putting his own money into it, and not many Victorian children had many schools to go to.

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Gradgrind himself is described as having an “inflexible, dry and dictatorial” voice. He is a “square” person and this can be seen not only through Dickens’ description of his personality, but also through the description of his physical appearance, “square coat, square legs, square shoulders”, all of which suggest Gradgrind’s unrelenting rigidity. The first time we see Gradgrind in the novel, he is giving a speech to a group of young students, cramming facts into the children’s heads. Gradgrind says he is “ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you what it comes to”. ...

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