Education in Coketown is a process by which innocence and imagination are rooted out of the children so they will grow into soulless automatons expecting nothing other than the drudgery of industrial life. By depicting the potential evils of mass education in this very cynical light, Dickens adopts a position often espoused by radical theorists who state that the power structure uses society's supposedly benevolent institutions to perpetuate its own power and to subjugate those whom these institutions are supposed to help.
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. Clearly Gradgrind's ideas about education are modelled after his own narrow gifts. Dickens employs two powerful images in this paragraph to illustrate the destructive nature of Gradgrind's brand of schooling. In the first, Gradgrind is portrayed as a weapon firing facts whose purpose is to "blow [the children] clean out of the regions of childhood." Dickens makes the weapon a cannon rather than a pistol or rifle to make the assault that much more brutal. In the second, Gradgrind is a machine -- a "galvanizing apparatus" -- and the children are partially assembled products who are having one part, their "tender young imaginations" replaced by another, and a "grim mechanical substitute." Once again, Dickens emphasizes how much this style of education depersonalizes the children by giving them numbers. When at the end of Chapter 1 he referred to the children as vessels "then and there arranged in order," he must have been referring to this numbering system.
'Now, if Mr. M'Choakumchild, said the gentleman, 'will proceed to give his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode of procedure.' The meaning of the teacher's name hardly needs to be noted, unless you read it over too quickly. It deserves to be sounded out completely. The metaphor Dickens uses to describe the schoolmaster's training is brilliant and rich with meaning. The schoolmaster is one of 140 identical, interchangeable teachers created in a teacher education factory. They are all "turned" on the same educational lathe to exact specifications, with no variation whatever, "like so many pianoforte legs." The teachers, in other words, are relatively insignificant blocks of wood shaped to prop up a complex musical instrument, which, we can infer, is society.
“He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him!” this shows A heady warning to end the second chapter. Even if we felt it were desirable to kill fancy in children and make them soulless drones to fill the factories, is it possible, or will we just "maim" and "distort" children's imaginations into twisted, dangerous forms? This thought ends Dickens' visit to the schoolroom in the novel.
At the start of chapter three “There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They had been lectured at, from their tender’s years; coursed, like little hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture-room. The first object with which they had an association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it…No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.” This shows a bit more about Gradgrind's views on education and the way he raises his children.
Word Count – 1090
