I read a few books over the Christmas and New Year break, and for one I decided to revisit an old friend I first met as a young teenager. You’ve probably met him too. His name is Charles Dickens, and his literary creations are legendary: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities come to mind, with unforgettable characters like Oliver, Miss Havisham, Mr Macawber, Ebeneezer Scrooge, and Sydney Carton. Wonderful, unique characters I had the pleasure to meet over many years. But I didn’t revisit any of those.
I went back to a lesser-known novel by Dickens. Hard Times was published in1864, when the factories of the industrial revolution dominated the northern townsand cities of England. Dickens places his story and its characters in Coketown,where a cloud of industrial smog hangs over the town, and the great majority of its citizens live in poverty, working seemingly endless hours on mindless, soullesswork in its factories. But Dickens doesn’t focus on the factories; he focuses on a family, and on a school.
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!
These are the opening words of Hard Times, spoken by the headmaster, Mr Gradgrind, to a young teacher who is about to teach his first lesson at a Coketown school. Hard Times is Dickens’s take on the English education system and contemporary model of parenting, spawned by the industrial revolution, based essentially on the philosophy of utilitarianism: only what is materially useful is worth learning.
Here is how Dickens begins his description of the teacher, Mr M’Choakumchild:
He and some one hundred and forty other school masters had been lately turnedat the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like as many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.
The rest of the paragraph is devoted to a long list of what the pre-service teachers have learnt in their studies: everything is based on facts, including: etymology, syntax, biography, astronomy, geography, French, German, Latin, Greek, all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains ... That is about half the list, the lengthy paragraph closing with these two sentences:
Ah, rather overdone M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
I don’t want to spoil the surprises that Dickens conjures into his tale if you haven’t read the book, but I want to explain why my re-reading of Hard Times has given rise to this reflection.
The children at the school on that day at the beginning of the novel are all the children of workers in the factories of Coketown, except for three: Mr Gradgrind’sson Tom, his daughter Louisa, and Sissy Jupe. Sissy is the daughter of a horsetrainer in a travelling circus. Sissy is constantly corrected by Mr Gradgrind and Mr M’Choakumchild for having ideas that are not based on utilitarianism. The following exchange occurs when Sissy tries to explain to Mr M’Choakumchild why she thinks flowers should be represented on carpet:
You would put tables and chairs on them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?
It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy –
Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy!. That’s it! You are never to fancy. Fact, fact, fact!
Later in the novel, when the children have grown into young adulthood, several of them, including Mr Gradgrind’s two children, find they have landed themselves in trouble: one trapped in a harsh, loveless marriage, and one who has broken the law. And Dickens’s main point kicks in: these young people have come through an education system and a model of parenting that have left them completely unprepared for life. And who helps them to come through and rescue their futures? Sissy Jupe and the circus people, all uneducated in the formal sense, but who bring a combination of creativity, spontaneity, and an understanding of how relationships, including parenting, work: things not just absent from the formal education system of the time, but deliberately excluded from it. It’s Sissy and the circus people who have the capabilities to help those young people find a way through the problems they’ve got themselves into.
The novel ranges through other events and characters, but it returns to thatfundamental message: the education system and the recommended rules of parenting were based on a popular ideology of the time – utilitarianism – and left its students unable to think for themselves, to have any ideas about the kinds ofrelationships that would impact on their lives, and no ability to think ethically or critically. Any ideas contrary to utilitarianism, such as Sissy’s views on why there should be flowers on carpets, were ‘rooted out’ in school before they could be developed. The people who did know how to cope with life came from a circus: uneducated but wise, warm, experienced and resilient in coping with what life serves up.
It raises an interesting question. If Dickens lived today would he see a need to write a novel about the impact of the education system on our young people?What would he see as the prevailing ideology guiding it? What would he make ofthe predominant external summative assessment system for senior students? What would he say about pedagogy? Would he see a link between parenting and education? How would he view pre-service teacher education? How empowered for life would he see young people when they have come through the system?
Please don’t get me wrong. I see much that is good in our education system and I’d have positive answers to many of those questions. I just wonder if at times we should cast the same eyes over it that Dickens did in his time, and ask the same questions that lie tacitly beneath his narrative in Hard Times. In summary, I wonder if this is what Dickens was asking:
Are we teaching the right things, in the right ways, offering the right opportunities, to empower our young people for a fulfilling and prosperous life, to have uplifting and caring relationships, with the resilience, creativity and ethical base to make good decisions and cope with the ‘hard times’ they will inevitably face?
I think that’s worth reflecting on.
Norman Hunter Oam
ACEL QLD Branch Executive Member