Word: gradgrind
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Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction...
...Scrap. Josiah Bounderby (Timothy West) is the apostle of the creed, the poor boy who made good, a man of red-faced bluster and aggressive self-pity. "I'm a bit of dirty riffraff," he brags, "a genuine scrap of rag, tag and bobtail." His young wife Louisa Gradgrind (Jacqueline Tong, who played Daisy in Upstairs, Downstairs] is as much a victim of the times as her husband's workers. Her father (Patrick Allen), who runs what is thought to be a progressive school, has taught her to ignore all feeling and rely only on facts. "How satisfying...
...Bounderby and the Gradgrinds know all facts and possess no feelings. Ignorance of their own hearts darkens their lives as the smoke outside darkens their windows. "You learnt a good deal, Louisa," says Mrs. Gradgrind (Ursula Howells), "-ologies of every kind, -ologies, -ologies, from morning till night, -ologies of every description. But there is something your father missed out, or forgot." It takes Mr. Sleary (Harry Markham), the disreputable owner of a circus, and Sissy (Michelle Dibnah), the daughter of a clown, to explain the lessons of dreams and imagination. Hard Times is the story of Louisa's slow...
...criticism levelled at Professor Lake for "teaching a work with emphasis on its modern practical aspects rather than on its purely factual and historical content" is summed up in Gradgrind's "Now, what I want is, Facts.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 up everything else...
...regard to this subject. But if a confession of sentiment is to be considered a confession of folly, why then it behooves every true lover of sentiment boldly to acknowledge himself such, and bear up as he may against the abuse of Mr. Bounderby, the facts of Mr. Gradgrind, or the more delicate sarcasm of less fictitious persons...
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