A Practical Education

The first two chapter of Hard Times may be among the most memorable parts of the book.  The schoolmaster’s rant about facts, the bare and monotonous school room, the children addressed by inhumanizing numbers rather than names… and silly questions like “define a horse.” 

Apart from the other delightful aspects of education (the endless memorization of facts), the children also received practical education in how to decorate a house.

No decorative wallpaper!  No pictures of horses on the walls!  You don’t see horses on the walls in real life, it is ridiculous!  That is a fact!  And if you don’t see it in real life, you don’t do it! 

Girl number twenty, would you carpet your room with representations of flowers?

“They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy…”

“You are never to fancy!” (Dickens 5).

Poor girl number twenty.  And the rest of those children too, to have their imagination crushed and outlawed.  Not even my fourth grade teacher was quite that bad, and she was pretty scary.

The teacher in Gradgrind’s school, Mr. M’Choakumchild was certainly highly educated.

“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.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin and Greek.  He knew all about the Water Sheds of the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass” (Dickens 6). 

Shortly after Hard Times was published, the paragraph describing M’Choakumchild was reprinted under the title “Description of a Modern Trained and Certificated Schoolmaster” (Collins 31).  Heaven help those poor students! 

Others saw nothing wrong with such a system.  After all, it isn’t a disadvantage for teachers to know a lot of facts, as long as they are also good at teaching (Collins 31).

But Dickens had done his research, and Gradgrind’s school and headmaster M’Choakumchild were not entirely fictional. 

Mr. M’Choakumchild had just come from a training college.   Training colleges for student-teachers were new and attracting attention in educational circles at the time the book was written.  Much had been expected from the first graduating group of Queen’s Scholars, since the results of the new educational scheme could be seen and judged.  Dickens himself was particularly interested in this new method of training teachers, since he had been urging that underqualified teachers should be removed from schools (Collins 29). 

School Inspectors, headmasters, and principals complained, however, that the education students were receiving focused too much on memorizing useless information and was not relevant to the real needs and abilities of the children (Collins 31).  Education with a mechanical, factorylike, fact-focused approach may have done wonders for expanding the capacity of the memory, but it was not succeeding at educating “the whole child” (Collins 32).  The excessive facts that students memorized were useless in real-life situations, while necessary skills like reason and judgement were undeveloped.  Such an education was simply not practical. What would the eminently practical Gradgrind have said?

The lessons taught in the school were also not entirely fictional.  Consider for a moment the incredibly silly question put to Sissy, who belonged to the equestrian troupe of a circus: “Girl number twenty, what is your definition of a horse?”

Sissy may have been dumbfounded by the absurdity of the question, but the prize pupil Bitzer was ready with an answer: “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” (Dickens 3). 

This was actually not an uncommon practice in a nineteenth century English classroom.  It was an example of an “object lesson.”  Teacher’s manuals of the time were full of them.  One such example from an actual teacher’s manual instructs the teacher to direct students to “produce, draw, or imagine a cat.”  After the students imagine a cat, the lesson begins: “Having preceded thus far, determine the family Felinae, Lt. felis, English, feline.  Synopsis of Felinae. – Front teeth in each jaw, 6; canine teeth, 2 in each jaw, very powerful and formed for tearing; molar or cheek teeth, 4… Head, large and round; eyes… Feet formed for walking; toes on the fore feet, 5; hind feet, 4…” (Collins 36). 

Sound’s a bit like Bitzer’s description of a horse, right? 

What was the purpose of such silly questions?  Well, it was a distortion of the object lessons invented by Pestalozzi, who intended that the technique be used to teach students to observe and correctly describe nature (Collins 36-37).  But without the actual object in front of them, the students did no observing or describing what they observed.  The lesson became a simple repetition of facts given by the teacher.

Education in Gradgrind’s school focused on memorization of facts.  Sound even passingly familiar?  In an era where teaching is focused on standardized tests (which measure knowledge of facts, but not critical thinking skills), and classrooms with twenty or more children (where individual attention is impossible), the educational system portrayed Dicken’s Hard Times may have more in common with the realities of the present than we would like to admit. 

Works Cited

Collins, Philip. “Good Intentions and Bad Results.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hard Times. Edited by Paul Edward Gray. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Dover, 2001. Print.