The Presentation of Education in Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Examine the presentation of Education, chapters 1 to 4 in Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens wanted to attack the failings of education and the

wrong-headedness of the prevailing philosophy in education. He

believed that many schools discouraged the development of the

children’s imaginations, training them as “little parrots and small

calculating machines” (Dickens used this phrase in a lecture he gave

in 1857). Nor did Dickens approve of the recently instituted teacher

training colleges. These had been set up in the 1840s, after the

British government acknowledged the need to raise the standard of

education in schools. The first graduates of these training colleges

began teaching in 1853, a year before the publication of Hard Times.

M’Choakumchild, the teacher in Gradgrind’s school (which was a non

fee-paying school that catered to the lower classes), is Dickens’s

portrait of one of these newly trained teachers.

Many educators agreed through time-sharing Dickens’s view of what were

wrong with the schools. They believed there was too much emphasis on

cramming the children full of facts and figures, and not enough

attention given to other aspects of their development, for example “'NOW,

what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out

everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon

Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the

principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the

principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'”

Dickens chooses to begin the novel in the classroom, which he depicts

as a microcosm of the inhuman world ou...

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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.