Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

Trisha and Cosmic will be reading Hard Times together beginning March 1 and would love to have fellow members join them.

I'm in!

Thank you for setting this up, Rosemarie.

A great book! Hope you all will enjoy the reading!

Trisha wrote: "Thank you for setting this up, Rosemarie."

Any time!

Thank you Trish and Rosemary for setting this thread up for us.

How is the reading going? I read this a couple months ago but am going to re-read it with everyone!

I have also read this book before. I think this book influenced Leo Tolstoy philosophy of education.

(view spoiler)[
Does anyone know what philosopher or philosophy thought of man as a receptacle for information? That filling a child's mind with facts is an education? And what facts are the "important" ones?

This was really important to me when I was homeschooling my children. It was also significant to me when I got out of high school and realized how uneducated I really was!

I wonder if anyone will be reading any nonfiction as part of a counterpart to this story?

One that i plan to read is Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto.

https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOf... (hide spoiler)]

I hope to start this next week, after I finish the two books I'm reading,

Thank you for joining us, Melissa. Enjoy finishing your other books Rosemarie.

This is one of the Dickens books that I have never read before even though it’s been on my list for ages so I was pleased when Cosmic suggested a buddy read.

I have read just the first 7 chapters.

It's been quite a while since I've read Dickens so just put this on hold. Now I have to remember that it's here because of course tax season starts at our house this week.

I just finished this book today. I just enjoyed the story and didn't want to break it up to much. Charles Dickens is amazing when he makes characters come to life. I am rather jealous that he knows how to be a creator of people.

I will think more about this book befpre adding to the discussion.

I finished the book today, but was disappointed by it. There were some little touches of humour & it was much shorter than many of his books. But the written dialect & a character with a lisp made some parts almost incomprehensible.

(view spoiler)[ Gradgrind seemed pompous & a bully - so his willingness to help a thief escape justice seemed unlikely.
Stephen Blackpool was my favourite character & seemed more realistic than some of the others. (hide spoiler)]

I just finished Hard Times. Really good...about raising children on facts and raising them on imagination. I think I was raised on facts. If you were raised on imagination I would love to hear how your parents cultivated this?

I definitely raised my children more freely and let them experiment a lot. Our home was more like a science lab. We bought them tape players for Christmas and visited the library for books on tapes.

I had a friend that lived on a farm and labeled different places on the farm after places in loved stories.

Children of the Forest that reminds me of this book. If i had it here I would read it! I tried to make this story be a part of our family because we enjoyed hunting mushrooms.

This was actually something that I wrote for This is Your Life challenge / group is called Back to the Classics.

I want to post the list of characters.

(view spoiler)[

CHARACTERS
Bitzer, a well-crammed pupil in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school.

Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired wholesale hardware merchant.

Thomas Gradgrind, his youngest son; a selfish, ill-natured whelp.

Mrs. Gradgrind, the feeble-minded wife of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind.

Jane Gradgrind, younger daughter of the preceding.

Louisa Gradgrind, the eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind;
afterwards the wife of Mr. Josiah Bounderby.

Cecilia Jupe (“ Sissy ”), the daughter of Signor Jupe, a circus clown

Mr. Josiah Bounderby, a boastful and wealthy manufacturer. and banker.

Mrs. Sparsit, an elderly lady, Mr. Bounderby’s housekeeper

Stephen Blackpool, a honest, hard-working power-loom weaver in
Mr. Bounderby’s factory.

Mrs. Blackpool, the wife of Stephen Blackpool; a dissolute, drunken woman.

Rachael, a factory hand; a friend of Stephen Blackpool’s.

Mr. James Harthouse, a friend of Mr. Gradgrind’s.

Mr. E. W. B. Childers, a member of Sleary’s Circus Troupe.

Signor Jupe, a clown in Sleary’s Circus Troupe.

Mr. M'Choakumchild, a teacher in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school.

Slackbridge, a trades-union agitator.

Mr. Sleary, a stout, flabby man; the proprietor of a circus.

Emma Gordon, a member of Sleary’s Circus Troupe.

Mrs. Pegler, a mysterious old woman, withered, but tall and shapely.

Lady Scadgers, a fat old woman; great-aunt to Mrs. Sparsit.

Josephine Sleary, a fair-haired young woman; the daughter of
Mr. Sleary, the circus proprietor. (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[
I don't really know where to start in discussing this book. It is a book that begins with "the facts". It is a very dogmatic at the very beginning.

When this book was written:
"Hard Times: For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Ti...

School was not compulsory at the time this book was written. I think that we forget what life was like for a child that wasn't forced to go to school and to create a "permanent record".

Charles Dickens has given us two sets of people. One is priveleged, and the other is considered the working class.

When I look through this list of characters the ones that I am most endeared to are Cecilia Jupe, Rachel and Stephen Blackpool. What these three individuals have in common is that they were not molded by facts but by experiences and they came out of those experiences as human.

I too was disappointed in the fact that "Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired wholesale hardware merchant," was trying to manipulate circumstances so that his son would not have to pay for his crime (or embarrass the family.) But after thinking about it, I think this was true to his nature!! I think that rather than giving us what we wanted Charles Dickens gave us the truth.

Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, had been a merchant and then a teacher. He traded in people. He had a factory that created minds out of facts. He was impersonal. He was a machine...churning out a product that was see as "valued".

The people that he was churning out of his education mill was not a thinker. They didn't design anything. In fact they were rewarded not for thinking but for regurgitating. For the manufacture doesn't need someone that can think (how to get himself out of this mill job), but someone that takes orders. Someone that thinks for him.

We find that Louisa Gradgrind, has come to the truth of herself. That she was wholesaled to Mr. Josiah Bounderby. This was sold to her, as a marketing ploy, very sophisticated pressure. Like Louise was a designer wife for her designer husband so they could have designer babies. Creepy father.

When his father finds out that it is the son that is the thief and not the mill worker, Stephen Blackpool. He spends three days "buying time", thinking about what can be done to get his son out of this scrape.

He doesn't even know where his son is till Cecilia Jupe admits to having given Thomas Gradgrind some intelligence and also some advice to go join the circus.

What I think is interesting about this is that the circus is made up of misfits. It was their language that created a barrier that could not be overcome through "facts". This was a "crowd" of misfits that understood what it was like not to fit in and to need the mastery of escape (or disguise) to survive.

Bitzer, was Mr. Gradgrind, model student. He did everything by the book. He knew what a horse was. He excelled where there were facts. Black and White. He made a very good company man.

I don't think that Hard Times is a story as much as a satire on a philosophy of the Prussian School. It is a story about what will happen to children and to families and to society if it is run through the mill of education. And it is this that makes this book one of my all time favorites of Charles Dickens. Because he foresaw the dangers of "facts" stuffed into children before they were ready to discern what those "facts" were and how they were emotionally being manipulated.

So I want to end this by referring you to another book. You really only need to read the first chapter to get a feel for what I am am talking about here. Since this book is now free on archive.org I hope that you will take advantage of it. I hope that in doing this you will gain more reflection in what you have read in Hard Times and what Charles Dickens real motive in writing this story.

https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOf...

I probably will come back and revisit this book and comment on the similarities between this book and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. I just started reading this book today and I was just so emotionally overcome between Hard Times and what I was reading in this book. It just adds so much to what happened to me and what has happened to our country.

In some ways we see in "Thomas Gradgrind, his youngest son; a selfish, ill-natured whelp", who ends up going to a penal colony as the end result of robbing children of their souls. Which treating them as "pitcher" from which fact are pour in and expected to flow out, is impersonal and leads to a society that must be run by an institution like a jail. Which reminds me of another book Lord of the Flies


Trisha, I was kinda put off, by the language as well. Fortunately I had someone reading it to me (and this made for a very pleasant experience.) I read and listened to the text and sometimes I still couldn't make it out exactly. But I don't think Charles Dickens hid anything of importance in those lines. I think if anything, just like you couldn't understand them neither could the privilege class and it created a natural barrier. (hide spoiler)]

Marriage
(view spoiler)[
We have three marriages in this book. I have been thinking about two of them.

One is, Stephen Blackpool, a honest, hard-working power-loom weaver in Mr. Bounderby’s factory, who is married to; Mrs. Blackpool, the wife of Stephen Blackpool; a dissolute, drunken woman. They have been married for nineteen years. He would like to get divorce.

He says of her, "She took to drinking, left off working, sold the furniture, pawned the clothes, and played old Gooseberry."

Was not sure what the word old Gooseberry meant:
https://wordhistories.net/2017/04/16/...

He had resorted to paying her to stay away. For five years he paid her to stay away from him.
So he has come to ask Mr. Bounderby how he is to go about getting rid of his wife.

Mr Bounderby says, "What do you mean? What are you talking about? You took her for better for worse."

Stephen says, explains how if you are in a privilged class you can divide up your belongings but he doesn't have these privileges. "So, I mun be ridden o' this woman, and I want t' know how?"

"No, how," returned Mr. Bounderby.
------------------------------

Now we have Louise and Mr. Josiah Bounderby. I am going to skip how they were married for the moment. They have marital problems.

Interesting that he makes a distinction between someone that was born a lady and one that was educated. "Highly connected females have been astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself, and to witness her insensiblity. They have wondered how I have suffered it. And I wonder myself now, and I won't suffer it."

Mr. Gradgrind say, "You have accepted a great charge of her; for better for worse, for--"

"As to your daughter, whom I made Loo Bounderby, and might have done better by leaving Loo Gradgrind, if she don't come home tomorrow, by twelve o'clock at noon, I shall understand that she preferes to stay away, and I shall send her wearing apparel and so forth over here, and you'll take charge of her for the future. What I shall say to people in general, of the incompatiblility that led to my so laying down the law, will be this. I am Josiah Bounderby, and I had my bringing-up; she's the daughter of Tom Gradgrind, and she had her bringing-up; and the two horses wouldn't pull together... I always come to a decision and whatever I do, I do at once."

Now what was interesting about this was something that I read in Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling that is reflected in this:


Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are
two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children* School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident* Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr* Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up* In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States , Ellwood P* Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years already, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new* This same Cubberley was an intimate colleague of Dr* Inglis: both were in charge of textbook publishing divisions at Houghton Mifflin — Cubberley as chief of elementary school texts; Inglis of secondary school texts* Cubberley was dean of Stanford s influential School of Education as well, a friendly correspondent of Conant at Harvard* He had written in his book Public School Administration (1922) that "Our schools are** ♦factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned ♦ ♦ ♦" And that it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down*

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were* Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives* Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions* We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults* We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television*

https://archive.org/stream/WeaponsOfM...

My point is that Josiah Bounderby is acting like a child. Louise acted like a child when she was told to marry Josiah. She was obedient. This is what her education set her up to be.

We have, for example,
H.L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924
that the aim of public education is not

♦ ♦ ♦ to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken
their intelligence. ♦ . ♦ Nothing could be further from the truth.

The aim...is simply to reduce as many individuals as possi-
ble to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized
citizenry, to put down dissent and originality That is its aim
in the United States ♦ ♦ . and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Menckens reputation as a satirist, you might be tempted to dismiss this passage as hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. (hide spoiler)]

Cosmic:

Your message #15:

(view spoiler)[ It’s interesting that you were also put off by some of the language. In other books too, I have felt that Dickens tried to be funny by changing words & it always irritates me! I know other authors do it too. It just seems an unnecessary complication & particularly difficult for anyone who has learnt English as a foreign language or wants to look up the meaning of unfamiliar words. Perhaps Rosemarie can say what happens when the books are translated for sale in other languages?

I agree that listening to books often helps & also emphasises humour that may otherwise be missed. In this book the northern accent used is one that I’ve heard often enough for it to be mostly understandable - but I really dislike reading things written this way. As for the lisping…!

It’s funny how tiny details distract us - the word “gooseberry” is still used in that way (perhaps not by young people) so I didn’t realise that might be a problem. (hide spoiler)]

Thank you for the detailed comments, I’ll look further when I have more time.

I just picked up a copy of this from the library yesterday and hope to get to it soonish.

How Education Dumbs Kids Down

https://archive.org/details/dumb-down

(view spoiler)[

Reflecting on this video and Thomas Gradgrind, Louisa Gradgrind and Cecilia Jupe, really speaks volumes. We don't hear how Thomas does in school, but I imagine he was not the star pupil. In fact his way to get ahead was through influence, primarily his sisters and gambling. What could he "do"? His whole childhood was about cramming facts into his head. What if they aren't the right facts? What if cramming facts is the wrong way to learn and build self esteem? I never realized what Thomas even did for the bank, did you?

Louise, was just such a good and obedient, compliant lump of clay. He father lived her most. No doubt she was a star student. When her father told her that she was a woman now, well that was her coming of age. When her father tells her to marry Mr Josiah Bounderby, what's a girl to do? Submit to what is expected.

How has our society created these people through schooling? Even grooming our politicians and our clowns (actors, sports players), and authority figures such as doctors. And what kind of position are we to take when we go to the doctors office? One of subordination. And what facts were stuffed into his head? Not nutrition!! But a drug salesman. A true company man!

Just like Bitzer, (a well-crammed pupil in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school.)

How many kids of rich an influential families do you know that have turned out like Thomas? What did they do when their child couldn't cut the mustard? Splendour & Squalor: The Disgrace and Disintegration of Three Aristocratic Dynasties There are lots of stories made around these characters. Charismatic, narcissistic, "a selfish, ill-natured whelp."

What classic stories are made of!

Cecilia Jupe, she tries to fit in but can't fit the mold. She suggest if less was required of her she might have done better.
Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, mathmatically calculates that she will not be one of the exceptional pupils, gives her to do menial tasks around the house of caring for Mrs. Gradgrind, the feeble-minded wife of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind.

This is how I see these people's role in this book and the story that they express.

This the factory of Coketown. We need weavers, miners to mine the coal, and caregivers of the feeble-minded wives.

Reflecting on Mrs. Gradgrind, the feeble-minded wife of Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, she had her start, the same way Louisa, was passed off to Mr. Josiah Bounderby. (hide spoiler)]

Welp

This was a discussion about the word welp in relation to Thomas. I think it adds to our discussion.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I've just finished the book and took a while to get into it, but then about half way through I was much more interested.
It's not the most cheerful book but not as grim as I thought it would be.

I agree that the lisped conversation was distracting and difficult to understand at times.
(Compare the dialect in this book to Wuthering Heights, if you've read it. I don't know which is harder to understand.)

Translating is a fine art, and there are ways to do dialects and regional accents-but it's a difficult skill to master.

Rosemarie wrote: "I've just finished the book and took a while to get into it, but then about half way through I was much more interested.
It's not the most cheerful book but not as grim as I thought it would be.

..."

Thanks for your comments, Rosemarie. I agree, it wasn’t as grim as I had expected either.

Wuthering Heights? I didn’t like the book at all, but the dialect didn’t bother me as much as I could “hear” & understand it. Many years ago I had a friend from Yorkshire & she had a very strong accent so it became more familiar.

Hard Times disappointed me as it’s set around the same area & time as North and South & some other books by Elizabeth Gaskell, all of which I liked much more.

Cosmic wrote: "Welp

This was a discussion about the word welp in relation to Thomas. I think it adds to our discussion.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..."

Sorry Cosmic - I forgot to reply to this sooner. Yes, it’s an interesting discussion. When reading the book I wondered about the word “whelp” being used so often. Perhaps it was a fashionable term when the book was written. I would have called him a “spoilt brat” instead! As a young boy, especially at that time, he would probably have been treated as more important than his sisters & given more privileges, so became selfish & arrogant.

I'm waiting for a better time to start reading this work.

I started this last night as a brain cleanser after reading too much of a book with a nasty protagonist and then some nonfiction.

I hope it helps! It starts slowly but the pace picks up about midway, and doesn't let up after that.

I am reading Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling as a companion to Hard Times.

(view spoiler)[
I see the merchant (who is what the teacher Mr. Gradgrind was, before he decided to teach. People that don't do teach. ) And then we have the banker, Mr. Josiah Bounderby. To me they represent people that would like to mold society. International Movers and Shakers.

So a quote from John Taylor Gatto.

"School is the first impression we get of organized society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a schale of winners and losers/ like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us.

"Work in a classroom itsn't important work. It fails to speak to real needs pressing on the young. It doesn't answer burning questions which day-to-day experience forces upon young minds. Problems encountered outside school walls are treated as peripheral when in truth they are always central. The new effect of making work abstract -- "subject" -centered --external to individual longings, fears, experiences and questions, is to render students of this enforced irrelevance listless and indifferent.

"The causes of sluggishness in the young have been well understood for a long time. I'm tempted to say forever. Growth and self mastery are reserved for those who vigorously self-direct, like Stanley: planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out of your tormentors. But this is precisely the agenda school is set up to prevent. Think of school as a conditioning laboratory, drilling naturally unique, one-of-a-kind individuals to respond as a mass, to accept continual ennui, envy and limited competence as only natural parts of the human condition. The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, and passive, anxious, friendless, family-less people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap;...

"As our economy has been shaped by its architects, it relies upon encouraging frenzy for novelty, for fashion in more than clothing, ....It's an atttitude which induces nonstop consumptioon in a heady atmosphere of "out with the old, in with the new;" to escape from shame, an addiction to the spirit of the Cole Porter song, Anything Goes. That's the job the incessant bells perform in our schools: they teach a Monty Pythonesque relief at escape from responsibility, as they say in bell language, "And now for something completely different." Of course, you have to have deep experience with shame to fear it. But schools are an advanced workshop in that, too. The first day I taught, an old-time told me how to control my classes. "Humiliation," she said. "That's the only thing they fear. Shame them. Encourage other kids to shame them, too."

"One famous insider of modern schooling back in the post-WWI days (when the model was hardening) called government schooling "the perfect organization of the hive." That was H. H. Goddard chairman of psychology at Princeton. Goddard believed standardized test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function "special education" delivers today. The pain of endless daily humiliation would discourage reproduction among the inferior, Goddard thought. Charles Darwin had implied this gently, but his first cousin, Francis Galton, had virtually demanded it of responsible politicians of both sides of the Atlantic in his own writings.

"In 1930, The Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, a group then basking in reflected glory from the lessons of schooling in the new Soviet Union, declared the main purpose of schooling should be "effective use of capital," that valuable stuff through which "our unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." Now how do you suppose that idea got into circulation among the folks at a presumably left-wing organization? Talk about a house of mirrors! For the curious, you might want to buy Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of the Soviet Union. (Not listed in Goodreads)

https://archive.org/stream/WeaponsOfM...

You can read Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling at the link above. (hide spoiler)]

I haven't been good at getting to this, but have read more. I keep getting distracted with other books, but so far so good.

Karin wrote: "I haven't been good at getting to this, but have read more. I keep getting distracted with other books, but so far so good."

Keep it up! It has a lot to think about and so don't worry about going slow.

I came across this poem.

T.H. Lawerence, 1885- 1930.
Was written at a time he was teaching in Creydon [near London]. Lawerence became disillusioned with the work. In Englad at thisbtime, the government had made education compulsory. Many pupils had no desire to be educated, but were forced to attend school. He felt their time at school was futile; and his time, too, trying to teach them was a waste of time? So he abandoned teaching and became a full time author!

Last Lesson of the Afternoon
by D. H. Lawrence
When will the bell ring, and end this weariness?
How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart,
My pack of unruly hounds! I cannot start
Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,
I can haul them and urge them no more.

No longer now can I endure the brunt
Of the books that lie out on the desks; a full threescore
Of several insults of blotted pages, and scrawl
Of slovenly work that they have offered me.
I am sick, and what on earth is the good of it all?
What good to them or me, I cannot see!

So, shall I take
My last dear fuel of life to heap on my soul
And kindle my will to a flame that shall consume
Their dross of indifference; and take the toll
Of their insults in punishment? — I will not! —

I will not waste my soul and my strength for this.
What do I care for all that they do amiss!
What is the point of this teaching of mine, and of this
Learning of theirs? It all goes down the same abyss.

What does it matter to me, if they can write
A description of a dog, or if they can't?
What is the point? To us both, it is all my aunt!
And yet I'm supposed to care, with all my might.

I do not, and will not; they won't and they don't; and that's all!
I shall keep my strength for myself; they can keep theirs as well.
Why should we beat our heads against the wall
Of each other? I shall sit and wait for the bell.

The Crisis of Democracy
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, far-sighted American
businessmen, having metaphorically conquered the world, set about bringing the ancient dream of utopia alive through a psychological strategy pioneered in Germany. They would colonize the minds of the young, wipe the messy slates clean so they could be written upon fresh. What religion had conceived and philosophy affirmed now took on new urgency as science spelled out the biological disaster which might attend any delay. Darwin himself had spoken. And the laboratories of Germany.
Horace Manns efforts to make school attendance compulsory
were bankrolled by men of wealth, including the brilliant Peabody
family of New England. Mann was promised Daniel Webster's seat in Congress if he could pull off the trick, and he did, winning the Congressional seat as a prize. But we know the America of Manns day was already formidably literate and full of opportunity, so any attempt to portray this as philanthropy shouldn't be taken seriously.

In every age, men of wealth and power have approached education for ordinary people with suspicion because it is certain to stimulate discontent, certain to awaken desires impossible to gratify. In April 1872, the US Bureau of Education's Circular of Information left nothing to the imagination when it discussed something it called "the problem of educational schooling:' According to the Bureau, by inculcating accurate knowledge workers would "perceive and calculate their grievances;' making them "redoubtable foes" in labor struggles!

Best not have that. Thirteen years later in 1885, the Senate Committee on Education and Labor issued a report which contains this forceful observation on page 1382: "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes: Teaching the means to become broadly knowledgeable, deeply analytical, and effectively expressive has disturbed policy thinkers since Solomon, because these skills introduce danger into the eternal need of leaders to manage crowds in the interests of the best people.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations called for "educational schooling" to correct the human damage caused by ~mindless working environments, but Andrew Carnegie, writing 126 years after Smith, in The Empire of Business disagreed. Educational schooling, said Carnegie, gave working people bad attitudes, it taught what was useless, it imbued the future workforce with "false ideas" that gave it "a distaste for practical life:'

In 1949 in an essay which has slipped through the cracks of history, Science and the Moral Life, the academic, Max Otto, found the heavy involvement of business behind the curtain of schooling far from odd. He said it was something naturally to be expected.

A stupendous revolution in marketing had taken place under the
public nose, one brought about by the reality of mass production
which could not be constrained to simply meet human· demands,
but instead imposed the demands of production on human wishes.

Where once the conventional laws of supply and demand put the
buyer in the driver's seat, in the topsy-turvy world of financial capitalism demand had to be created for whatever could be supplied most profitably at the moment. To keep this golden goose laying eggs, consumption had to be taught as the most important end of life. It was this new reality, he said, that explained business manipulation of schooling:

It is natural businessmen should seek to influence the enactment and administration of laws, national and international,
and that they should try to control education.

Keep that uppermost in your mind as you read my book. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

Deliberate Deprivations
In his immortal book, Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith - the Scottish philosopher we regard as the father of capital "e" capitalism -made the distinction between education and schooling very clear. At no time did Smith claim education had anything at all to do with national prosperity, only free trade (competition unfettered by excessive rules) and a division of labor contributed to that.

The role of education, said Smith, was needed to compensate for
mutilations inflicted as by-products of those same processes which produce wealth. We need to understand that artificial environments produced by free trade and constant competition cause psychological damage in four ways: I) they make workers cowardly 2) stupid 3) sluggish 4) and indifferent to everything but animal needs. Only education (he called it "educationalng schooling") will heal the wounds to
community and individuality caused by capitalism.

According to the father of capitalism, the only differences between children of philosophers and those of street sweepers lies in the training they receive. All children, he asserts, have the talents we associate with elite families, all, that is, until the majority of young are deliberately deprived of "subject(s) for thought and speculation:' Those so deprived become "deformed;' unable to bear hard thinking. They lose "power of judgment, even as regards ordinary matters:' He could have
been describing public school kids in 2009.

From Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOf...

The reason for the above two post is because you have Mr. Josiah Bounderby, a boastful and wealthy manufacturer, and Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired wholesale hardware merchant. The manufacturer and the merchant were the best of friends.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith

I am sure Dickens would have been familiar with this book.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is on my tbr stack.

I'm still reading it. What he's trying to say is important, but I don't particularly like this one much. I'm only in the Book 2 part.

Karin wrote: "I'm still reading it. What he's trying to say is important, but I don't particularly like this one much. I'm only in the Book 2 part."

It does seem to be one that a lot of his readers don't like, although I rate it very highly, and have read it a number of times.

I finished this a few days ago and gave it 2 stars. I didn't like it, but there are some things Dickens does so well I couldn't see giving it only one. I finished a few days ago and am in a rush, so didn't write much of a review.

However, I will say that there are still people today who spend too much time focusing on percents and averages and some of the other points he makes.