Article Open Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2025.07.006
The Natural Education that Dickens Advocates in Hard Times
Zhi Zheng
School of Foreign Languages, Quzhou University, Quzhou 324000, Zhejiang, China.
*Corresponding author: Zhi Zheng
Published: August 19,2025
Abstract
In 1854, his novel Hard Times was published, which mainly handles the issue of bourgeois education by reflecting the reality of how the young grow up under the influence of bourgeois education in those days. Mr. Gradgrind, Louisa, Little Tom, and Bitzer are all victims of that age and serve as examples of thousands upon thousands of victims of British bourgeois education. Mr. Gradgrind’s failure in his practice of education results from his endless pursuit of profit, dogmatic comprehension, and impractical execution of education of the time. He falls into the educational trap based on bourgeois vanity, pretension, and lack of practice, leading to eventual failure. The paper refers to Dickens’ idea about natural education in his Hard Times, which proposes to develop people’s potential talent beyond the normal education that they received. Meanwhile, philosophy, ethics, as well as other social ideologies also contribute to the growing experiences of these young people. Through the analysis of how the capitalists use conventional education to train the young according to their interests, we have a better understanding of Dickens’s description and criticism of bourgeois educational ideas in Hard Times.
Keywords
Dickens; Natural education; Hard Times
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How to cite this paper
The Natural Education that Dickens Advocates in Hard Times
How to cite this paper: Zhi Zheng. (2025). The Natural Education that Dickens Advocates in Hard Times. The Educational Review, USA, 9(7), 664-668.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2025.07.006