Consequences without an imagionation
Hard Times by Charles Dickens is set out in three different books: The Sowing; The Reaping; The Garnering. They are named so as it has a special reference to the education and upbringing of children. The titles collectively underline the basic plot. It suggests that the grounding children received in their formative years would directly affect their adult lives. This comes evident as pupils of the Gradgrind system of education is not ready to tackle situations, which require imagination or experience in life.
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In Hard Times the two characters that are most affected by the Gradgrind system of education are Tom and Louisa Gradgrind. The Gradgrind system of education is the reason why Tom and Louisa are lacking in imagination and therefore are not ready to tackle every day human life. The Gradgrind education system was very common in Victorian times and was probably devised by the many rich powerful people ready to employ the pupils once graduated. As this type of education teaches its pupil’s to be a passive unthinking work force, therefore the employers could manipulate their minds, doing whatever they were told. The system forces the pupils to intake pure hard facts, nothing else, therefore not exercising the imagination at all. Leading the pupils to be lost in the surrounding world when a difficult problem requiring experience or maturity arises, as the Gradgrind system of education denies access to this knowledge.
The Gradgrind system of education seems to wipe out any chance of any fiction or fantasy in the minds of the pupils. If Louisa or Tom happen to even have the slightest hint of fantasy or fiction it would be immediately destroyed by their father who was a teac…
…is material, therefore losing readers. Also I think that was the reason why Louisa close relationship with Harthouse was justified by the way Bounderby treated her.
Summing up all the evidence I have deduced that the Gradgrind system of education was designed by powerful people to make an unthinking passive workforce so that they could take advantage of them and they wouldn’t rebel. The system was probably intended to produce people with no ability to think for themselves, with suppressed imaginations. The Gradgrind system of education has no interest in making pupils into well rounded people and is only an evil way of denying children their childhood for their own personal benefit. In Hard Times Dickens uses the book as the medium to express his bitter feelings against systems of education that were like Gradgrind’s, that were plentiful in Victorian Times.
