Dickens reveals that the school is dull and lifeless; there is no colour in the room or images that could stimulate a Childs mind. The word vault makes us think of a safe, a hard metal prison-like box that we use to lock away items of great importance and beauty. In this case it is the children’s imagination that is been locked away. All imagination, creativity and joy are taken away from the children, leaving them to learn the same monotonous lessons in a cold, blank classroom. Dickens is saying that the classrooms and way of teaching lacks imagination and creativity, things a child will need to expand there mind more than facts will.
Dickens emphasizes the word ‘facts’ to again show how the education system is driving away a Childs imagination.
‘NOW, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life…’
From the very beginning Dickens is establishing with the reader that facts alone are what is been taught to the children. The education system was based upon the learning of facts and nothing else. This is acknowledged by the constant repetition of the word fact in the first chapter, especially in the first paragraph. The repetition is used to emphasize the importance of facts and that nothing else will ever be of any service to the students. Dickens is mocking there believe that a child will need nothing in life but the knowledge of facts.
Dickens is even expressing his opinions on Victorian education with the names of the characters in Hard Times. The name ‘Thomas Gradgrind’ for instance is a metaphor for the teacher is doing to these children. He is working like a machine and grinding them up so that what is left of them is nothing but facts. ‘Mr. M’choakumchild’ is symbolising that the lessons of ‘nothing but facts’ are choking the children of all individuality and creativity, ‘Bitzer’ is a child that has taken in the teachings of facts and had become nothing but ‘bitz’ of facts and ‘Cecilia Jupe’ whos name comes from Cecilia the patron saint of music, a form of creativity and a way of expressing yourself, is showing how a child is before they have been filled with facts.
The use of exaggeration is carried on in the descriptions of the characters.
‘The speaker’s square wall of a forehead…, square coat, square legs, square shoulders…’
Now obviously the teacher is not an actual square but Dickens emphasizing the squareness of his body is another way in witch he is mocking the whole way of teaching. The teacher is talking about facts and the square itself is a fact. Something is either a square or not a square. You can’t be imaginative and have a 5 sided square, or you can’t have a square with one side longer than the other as it will be no longer a square, so it’s no longer a fact. A square is exact, just like a fact. The teacher has no imagination and is exact in the way of his teaching of facts, the way in witch millions of other teachers would have been taught.
The way Dickens describes the characters with metaphors is a way of expressing his views on the system.
‘He seemed a galvanising apparatus to…’
A galvanising machine uses electric shock therapy to erase parts of people’s memories. It is a horrible and extremely painful form of torture. Dickens is telling us that the teachers are trying to wipe these children clean, turning them blank so that they can be re-written with facts. Saying that the lessons are a form of torture is again using exaggeration, but there is truth behind it as well as they are attempting to clear the children’s mind of everything but pure facts.
The children Bitzer and Cecelia are before and after images of children in these schools.
‘But whereas the girl was dark-eyes and light-haired, so she received a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her, 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…;
Cecelia, who does not attend school regularly so has not been pumped full of facts, is healthy and beautiful, while Bitzer who has been attending school regularly is pale and ill looking. He appears to have the life sucked out of him. Dickens had described the children this way to establish an idea in out heads of what a daily dose of facts and nothing but facts and a life without creativity and joy will do us.
Irony is used in the opening chapters and Charles Dickens used this to make us to realise how unsuitable the way of learning is.
‘”Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!” said Mr.Gradgrind,’
This is ironic, as Dickens has gives us background information on the character Sissy Jupe (girl number twenty) and we know her father is in the trade of travelling and working with horses. She has grown up watching and being hands with the horses her father works with. Yet Bitzer gives a very factual response to the question and has properly never been near a horse in his life.
Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth…’
Bitzer can give all these facts about horses but if you asked him to ride one or to interact with a horse he wouldn’t know what to do, while Cecelia, who apparently knows nothing about horses, would be able to ride a horse and handle it in the proper way. This shows that by teaching children nothing but facts they are not getting a real life experience.
Another ironic moment in Hard Times in when Mr.Gradgrind asks Cecilia what her father does as a job. Her response that he belongs to the horse-riding is not good enough for sir and he changes the job to that of a veterinary surgeon.
‘What is your father? He belongs to the horse-riding… he is a veterinary surgeon…’
Cecilia’s father is not a veterinary surgeon but a horse trainer for the circus. Mr. Gradgrind made this up so that it sounded better, so it is not a fact. The teacher who has been filling these children with facts and squishing out any imaginative thought, who has been demanding they live with nothing but pure facts in there head has come out with a statement of pure fancy.
Throughout the book Dickens uses a common story to base his exaggerated metaphor on, he uses the story of Morgiana and the forty thieves, when the oil is pored onto the thieves. He uses this to create an allusion. Though in Hard Times the children are the replacement for the thieves and the oil are the facts that they are being taught, being relentlessly forced and poured into them up to the brim.
‘Imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim…looking into all the vessels before him, one after another, to see what they contained…’
Dickens uses this allusion to show that the school was like a jail where you were forced to learn all these facts until you were fill to the brim. The children are been filled with facts in order to drive out any imagination they have left.
Dickens also tells us of the consequences that the children may face if they continue with this teaching regime.
To conclude, in the opening chapters of Hard Times Charles dickens has satirised the education system by creating an exaggerated allusion of the way of teaching, almost to a point of ridicule but at the same time exposing the truth behind the education. This leads us, the readers, to believe that the system is wrong and inhumane to children. This is because they are suppressing the Childs imagination, a thing of great importance and opportunity. However Hard Times was written to humour the Victorians, but Dickens still manages to express his opinion and change the readers opinion, to feel the education system is doing unjust to the children in lacking major parts of a Childs mental development and not letting them reach there full prudential.