Education in Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The days of childhood are limited, and inevitably everyone will grow old. Yet the way a childhood should be spent has often been disputed, by some regarding it as a time to prepare for the future, and others as a chance to explore freedom. Charles Dickens, in Hard Times, portrays both sides of the argument in their most extreme forms. One might argue that much of Hard Times is about extremes. The first character to be introduced, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, enforces a very rigid approach to education, while everything contrary to his approach is depicted through Sleary’s Circus. In his school, Mr. Gradgrind uses techniques that have the effect of “mechanizing” the children, aiming to fill their minds with rationales and deplete any fancy. However, he will learn that not all of life’s problems can be figured out through calculation. Dickens allows the reader to see both philosophies in practice, and successfully persuades one to favor neither one nor the other, but a combination of both.
“You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.” (Dickens19) These words are the harsh reality that the children at Gradgrind’s school are forced to believe. The first of the philosophies that we see Dickens describe is one of immobility and a severe focus on factual information. Mr. Gradgrind, who is the principal of the school in Coketown, is a firm believer in facts and statistics. He has lived his entire life by his own book, and does his best to instill such “values” in his own children as well as in his students. The teachers at his school view their pupils as nothing more than empty vessels that they must fill with information. Topics such as poetry, fiction, or the fine arts are excluded from the curriculum at Gradgrind’s school, despite the necessity of these to expand and challenge a child’s mind, and imagination.
Cecilia Jupe, who