Charles Dickens, in the excerpt from his work Hard Times, wished to provide a form of social commentary through the use of character and caricature of opinion for the purposes of exaggerating a perspective, specifically that of Jeremy Bentham, to extreme, working to show the preposterousness of such a conceptualization (CITE).
Through the characters of Thomas Gradgrind, whose last name is a form of parody in and of itself, and M’Choakumchild, a name that likewise serves as a parody, Dickens is able to show that the teaching of facts, nothing more, and nothing less, serves to create an educational experience that works to strip children of basic necessary constructs like imagination and sympathy (CITE).
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"“Extended Study: Charles Dickens and the Novel”".
Gradgrind, a name whose portions conjure up an individual who has simply ground out the necessary studies, graduating, but not learning anything, or not learning anything of value, coupled with M’Choakumchild, whose name implies that the children are literally being choked with the fanciful concept that facts and not opinions or imagination are what matter, work to show how teaching cannot merely be about the facts to be obtained, but must be about the basic concept that individuals are only individuals if they are able to fully utilize all of their mental faculties, and that an education that fails to develop all faculties is not an education that may effectively apply the principles of Unitarianism which Bentham believed in so strongly (CITE). Happiness cannot exist if the mind cannot imagine anything other than a life or an experience based solely on facts.
