Hard Time's Schooling

Hard Times by Charles Dickens is truly a classic novel. There will also be turmoil between the rich and the poor: one aspect in society that has been affected by this turmoil is education. Funding for education is facing budget cuts affecting programs, teachers, and especially the students who attend schools and participate in those programs. Schooling then differs between the schools with more funding and schools with less. In Hard Times, readers are exposed to a school where nothing but fact is taught. In the school there is no room for imaginations, creativity or anything of the sort to run freely through children’s minds. It becomes quite clear that only the wealthier families are able to send their children to school, while the poor don’t have any means to pay for it. 

To a degree, this stands true in America today. One particular part of the novel developed this thought. When Sissy is given the opportunity to go to school—if she agrees to entirely rid herself of her past life—she is left to feel subordinate to the other students in class. She comes home one day and tells Louisa about her learning difficulties.  Sissy then explains what Mr. M’Choakumchild asked her: “‘National Prosperity. Now this classroom is a nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?” “I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figure at all” (Dickens 66). Sissy’s thoughts are similar to those of today. 

Another aspect of the school in Hard Times is that school is strict, lifeless and relies solely on information that can be explained through science, math, etc. Although it seems farfetched, it is happening today in subtle forms. Recess is being cut in grade school, art and music programs are being cut in colleges and secondary schools and books that open the mind are being banned. I recently watched an episode of “Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Headband”. In this episode Aang, the Avatar, is attending a Fire Nation school as someone else. Aang is a free spirit and realizes that the students in the school are rigid and lack spontaneity. Aang realizes this is an issue to his adolescent peers and decides to help them. The schooling in Hard Times is seen and feared in today’s society as well.