In "Hard Times," he exposes the folly of the popular Utilitarian education of his day, a program that adjured its students to stick only to facts, to repress their imaginations, and "never wonder" about such things as poetry or storybooks, and the usual joys of being young. Indeed, in an environment where students are called by number ("girl No. 20") rather than by their names, only the most pragmatic training fits in the curriculum, as the rote lessons create automatons devoid of free thinking and perfect for future factory exploitation.

In reading "Hard Times," students learn a wealth of information about Victorian England, but the most wonderful moments in the classroom begin when they start to apply Dickens to their own lives. One student noticed that Dickens' warnings about rote memorization applied directly today to such educational matters as standardized testing, and the "teaching to the test" mentality that drives so many of our middle and high schools, often leaving students sadly disconnected from their educational experiences.

Another student argued that the "just the facts" curriculum that ruins Dickens' characters' lives reminded her of recent trends in education to eliminate arts, music, and humanities programs, in favor of business, computers, and skills courses that seek to train rather than empower. Yet another reader wondered how these 21st-century educational dangers might have a similar effect on his life as the perils about which he read in Dickens.

Would a curriculum that is more about job training than critical thinking result in a diminished capacity for social awareness and resistance? Are our own educations creating modern-day automatons, perfect for our own office cubicles? What does this mean for our possibilities for freedom, agency, or authentic forms of democracy?

Dickens' novels continue to provoke crucially important questions and explorations about essential ideas today. In "Great Expectations," he questions the construction of gender identity, forcing us toward a revision of how we define masculinity, and what it takes to be a gentleman in a society that perpetuates male violence, possessiveness, and control as its distinguishing features. In the same novel, and elsewhere in "Oliver Twist" and "Bleak House," he cogently explores the pathology of domestic abuse, and the societal forces that enable violence against women.

CLASS WARFARE