Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Figure used with kind permission of Pie: The Search for Utopia (http://pieonedotzero.wordpress.com).

I. The Allegory of the Circus

Charles Dickens's Hard Times is not a novel that typically springs to mind in the context of discussions of education in utopia or dystopia. But maybe it should be. Hard Times stages a fierce debate between utopic and dystopic visions of nineteenth-century Britain and the future that it prepares its children for. On one side: Mr. Gradgrind and his school, with a sclerotic curriculum of "Facts, facts, facts" that hardens the heart and the mind and stamps out any spark of imagination. Gradgrind "manufactures," like identical widgets, model citizens in the form of the apathetic Bitzer. On the other side: Mr. Sleary and his traveling circus, with an endlessly inventive but also skills-oriented curriculum. The circus regards the associative knowledge that imagination makes possible as more valuable than the discrete facts and supposedly objective truths that rationality provides. Learning takes place in the heart, in the ring, and on the road, not in the rigid rows of seats in a dull classroom devoid of amusements or free spaces. Gradgrind's school turns out—like sticks of furniture—automatons that will be ideal cogs in the economic machinery. But the success of the circus depends both on highly trained performers and on the ongoing spontaneity and creativity that the rational faculty alone cannot provide.

Thus for the class of children spared the factory life, namely, the Gradgrind children, this curriculum that forbids curiosity and wonder—"Never wonder" is one of the schoolmaster's tenets—this "model education" turns out otherwise. In addition to the cold-blooded Bitzer, we follow the feckless Tom Gradgrind into crime and exile and the yearning Louisa into depression and solitude relieved only by the faithful Sissy Jupe, a circus child taken in hand by the Gradgrind household. By the end of the novel, the model of "calculation" that makes it possible to decide that some people, or some lands, or even the earth itself, are "expendable" in the face of positive gains in profit or power has been fundamentally destroyed, and another kind of calculation is proposed by Mr. Sleary, who saves the wretched Tom from criminal trial:

"It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don't it, Thquire?" said Mr Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy and water: "one, that there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t'other, that it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thomehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth of the dogth ith!"

Mr Gradgrind looked out of window, and made no reply. Mr Sleary emptied his glass and recalled the ladies.

". . . Thquire, thake handth, firtht and latht! Don't be croth with uth poor vagabondth. People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a working, they an't made for it. You mutht have uth, Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurtht!"

(Dickens 1851)

Shake hands, first and last—rather than raise children "by hand" (or the force thereof). Dickens's brilliance, of course, is recognizing that an education that reflects the ideological "value" of facts alone, of self-interest, of calculation and profit, and of social conformity and obedience produces precisely the "worst of us" that destroys so many lives—from the factory workers' to the Gradgrinds'—in a radically heartless industrial-capitalist society. Without the wisdom of creativity, play, sympathy, empathy, or kindness—that is to say, "the best of us"—we reap what we sow, to pick up the organic trope that structures the novel. The fruit of that educational labor is a "product," rather than a person: the worst of us. In Hard Times, the ideal education takes...