What do you learn about the Education System though the book, “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens

The Collins Gem English dictionary tells us that to educate is to teach; provide schooling for, therefore education is very important for life. The process of education not only makes us academically prepared for the wide-world but teaches us variable life lessons that we will need for the development from childhood to adulthood. Therefore, a good education is vital for development of oneself.

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."

"Hard Times" opens with a comical yet frightening lecture on the purpose of education. Significantly, the speech is not made by the schoolmaster, but by a businessman who underlines each point on the schoolmaster's sleeve, giving the impression that he is lecturing the instructor more than the students. These opening lines of “Hard Times” are in direct contrast to what Dickens believed, but it was the established teachings during this period.

Even the title of the second chapter, "Murdering the Innocents," is Dickens' assessment of this soulless, fact based system of education that he opposed so much. The children aren't being killed bodily; only the innocent part of them is being murdered, so that innocence and imagination never get in the way of their acceptance of the harsh realities of the dreary lives they are soon to face in the factory. This was the education style of the time.

Firstly, we learn that the classroom is;

“Plain, bare, monotonous vault,”

This description of the room gives us the impression that it is quite boring and intimidating for the children and you get the impression that it is never-changing. This is not a good classroom for the students to learn in, it doesn’t stimulate the mind and does not encourage creativity. The type of education offered to the children of that time was also very ‘plain, bare and monotonous’ Dickens also calls it a "vault” Dickens’ is using irony, a vault is a safe in which a rich man locks up his possessions for use at a later time, as within “Hard Times” these children are being locked away until they are ready for employment in the factory. Also, the classroom can be called a ‘burial chamber’. A burial chamber is a tomb where dead people are buried. This gives us the impression that the kids in the classroom were dead; they had all the natural life sucked out of them and became nothing more than zombies that follow the commands of their master, both in the classroom and the factory were they would spread most of their living natural life.

Dickens also uses irony, to criticize Victorian education. On the opening page of Hard Times, Dickens’ represents us with a “speaker” Dickens repeats descriptions in list form,

“The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice....the emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair...the speaker’s mouth...,”

and through repetition and irony, humor is created, showing us that Dickens’ found the education style disturbing and shocking, further showing us that he did not agree with it

Also, the word ‘square’ is repeated quite a lot. This is to show us that the speaker is like a square as the angles in ...

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Dickens also uses irony, to criticize Victorian education. On the opening page of Hard Times, Dickens’ represents us with a “speaker” Dickens repeats descriptions in list form,

“The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice....the emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair...the speaker’s mouth...,”

and through repetition and irony, humor is created, showing us that Dickens’ found the education style disturbing and shocking, further showing us that he did not agree with it

Also, the word ‘square’ is repeated quite a lot. This is to show us that the speaker is like a square as the angles in a square will always equal 360o and all the sides will always be the same in length. This stress the fact that the speaker is also like the square; never-changing, dull and inflexible.

“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”

This image of the students as vessels to be filled makes it clear that they are expected to be passive receptacles while there are ‘facts poured into them until they were full to the brim’ rather than active learners. This style of teaching at the time could be described as a Jug-mug situation, the teacher was the jug and they filled all the little mugs with ‘imperial gallons of facts’. Dickens’ was reminding us of his message of education, the children are seen as objects with no personalities forced to learn, not human beings. The narrative perspective in “Hard Times” helps to show how impersonal the system was

Secondly, we learn a lot about the Education system in Dickens’ time through the characters the presents us with. Dickens’ loves to give his characters the names they deserve and the name usually represents the characteristics of that person. . The word "gradgrind" seems to refer to a student who grinds out his schoolwork diligently but mindlessly. Clearly Gradgrind is the type of educator who ‘grinds’ his facts into the children.

Thomas Gradgrind, ‘a man of facts and calculations’ was a rather dictatorial man who would tolerate nothing but the bare facts; he was a ‘man of realities’ Thomas Gradgrind would adhere to his methods and his methods only and pushed his Utilitarian philosophy on his pupils; that with learning facts, people can better themselves and better their outcome in life. Thomas Gradgrind,

“With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature’

was a man who believed in his method of teaching; however is quite naïve as you cannot weigh and measure people or their natures, which is something ‘fact’, cannot do. It makes one think how close Gradgrind’s teaching methods were to his real life.

Dickens’ described Thomas Gradgrind, the typical teacher at that time as;

“A cannon, prepared to blow them [children] clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus too”

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 which makes 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, a "grim mechanical substitute." This also relates to the title of the chapter, ‘Murdering the Innocents’

Thomas Gradgrind also numbers his pupils,

“Girl number twenty”

Again, Dickens emphasizes how much this style of education depersonalizes the children by giving them numbers. 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.

The next character introduced is Sissy Jupe or Cecilia Jupe. Sissy lives by the philosophy of emotion, fancy and hope she is a character who is only new to the world of ‘fact’ as she is from the circus which is the world of ‘fancy’. Sissy has trouble adjusting to this world of ‘fact and fact alone’ as she ‘curtseys’ and ‘blushes’. Sissy Jupe's father is part of the traveling circus in town for a short while and Thomas Gradgrind hates everything the circus stands for, with all its fun and creativity that he refuses to allow Sissy to proclaim her father's true profession, which Gradgrind finds objectionable, so he reshapes it into a more respectable form. The circus where Sissy comes from is diametrically opposed to the style of education at that time. Thomas Gradgrind has a hatred for Sissy because they both oppose each other and they foreshadow the theme of Fact Vs Fancy within the novel.

When Bitzer is introduced when Sissy is not able to recollect factual definitions off by heart on the spot, Dickens’ gives us an interesting description of Bitzer compared to Sissy.

“That she [Sissy] seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.”

This is Dickens’ telling us about the children of Thomas Gradgrind’s style of teachings. The sunlight has different effects on these two children. Sissy is not a product of the education, she is a child of the natural world, and her innocence has not been ‘murdered’ and the sunlight seems to have ‘irradiated’ her. However, Bitzer on the other hand is a product of the factual education system; all natural life is taken away from him and you get the sense that he has been drained of spirit and personality making him no more than a robot who only responds when he is put into action by Thomas Gradgrind.

Bitzer gives us his lifeless, factual and dictionary-like description of a horse,

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive,”

With this description of a horse, no one would have any idea what a horse is. Dickens’ again tells us about the style of the education system because notice that Bitzer has said ‘incisive’ instead of incisors. This shows us that the children are not actually learning what these creatures are but just repeating what they have been told in this ‘parrot’ fashion way. Also, it is quite ironic that Sissy is being condemned for not knowing the text-book definition of a horse w hen, being born and bred in a circus environment and the daughter of a horseman, she probably has more knowledge about the animal than anyone else in the room.

With the introduction of M’Cloakumchild, we learn about the teachers of the time.

“He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.”

The schoolmaster, M’Cloakumchild is one of 140 identical, interchangeable teachers created in a teacher education factory. They are all ‘turned’ on the same educational machine to exact specifications, with no variation whatever, ’like so many pianoforte legs’

At the end of the paragraph with the description of M’Cloakumchild, Dickens’ creeps in his own judgement on the style of mannerisms of the teachers,

“If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!”

Dickens’ is telling us that even though M’Cloakumchild has learnt all these complex and factual subjects he is not a good teacher, he cannot teach the children what they really need to know, which is life-experiences and common knowledge. M’Cloakumchild could learn a lot from Sissy.

As the chapter finishes, Dickens’ paints us a picture of the ‘robber’ Fancy,

“Dost thou think that thou will always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within- or sometimes only maim him and distort him”

This tells us that the education system aims to kill the ‘fancy’ within the children and turn them into soulless drones or will the system just ‘maim’ and ‘distort’ children's imaginations into twisted, dangerous forms?

Lastly, we meet the ‘young Gradgrinds’. Gradgrind’s children play a major role on the emphasis of Victorian-like educational systems. Young Gradgrinds were ‘all models’ they were the perfect products in the eyes of Gradgrind of his own home-schooling.

“No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon,”

Nursery-rhymes and non-factual topics played no role in his children’s’ lives, they were unnecessary. Although the Gradgrind children both Louisa and Thomas were brought up in a fact based environment, Louisa seems to become knowledgeable of ‘fictional’ life; the circus at which her father is appalled. The circus; a symbol of rich, colourful life is a direct contrast to a ’life of facts.’ Perhaps Dickens is using Louisa as a symbol for those who despised the way children were treated and taught in the Victorian era.

Through my reading of ‘Hard Times’ and taking Dickens’ outlook on the Victorian education into view, I have concluded that the schooling of that era with the Utilitarian philosophy was harmful to the development of the children’s minds and personalities. Children cannot evolve with the ‘facts and facts alone are wanted in life’ attitude thus was not the way to educate children. Dickens’ demonstrates his disliking of the Education system though the novel ‘Hard Times’

Jonny Goodfellow 12M

Charles Dickens Coursework