Discuss Dicken

Education in Coketown is a process by which innocence and imagination are rooted out of the children so they will grow into soulless automatons expecting nothing other than the drudgery of industrial life. .
             This is why the education that existed in those days adopted an impersonal approach and students were taught in large groups, when a teacher did not even know their names. "Hard Times" deals with Utilitarian education as well. Students are taught to be extremely practical and education is based solely on facts and the Utilitarian principle: right answers must be universally right. The process of memorising as many facts as possible is referred to as "educational cramming" and this is one of the less grotesque metaphors found in this novel. A teacher is compared to a "cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them [the children to be educated] clean out of the regions of childhood". Children have no names and are referred to by index numbers. The most successful products of this system, for example, Bitzer, have a white complexion -an indication that education has literally stripped them of individuality. A chapter, where this process is described is named "Murdering the Innocents" which refers to replacing the rich personalities of children with cold and impersonal utilitarian attitudes. .
             Dickens accuses Utilitarianism of being responsible for the social malaise; the destruction of personality; for robbing people of probably the only real valuable thing they have - their individuality; for oppressing the women and the working class; and finally of depriving the children of a special stage of their life - their childhood. Dickens chose well when he used this factory-style method of mass education to begin his novel about the depersonalization and dehumanization caused by the excesses of the Industrial Revolution.