Dickens formed his opinions on education through his frequent forays into working-class neighbourhoods, visiting schools and exploring the forms of educational provision for local paupers. These first hand experiences made good copy for his journal Household Words and produced interesting material for his 1854 novel Hard Times. For Dickens, a good education could be the bulwark against ignorance, cyclical poverty and crime. Conversely, a badly run school could be the breeding ground for young, cunning criminals or, on the other hand, produce unimaginative, machine-like pupils ready for the industrial factory. Indeed, Dickens cast the school in Hard Times as an institution that turned-out life-less factory fodder enslaved to learning facts in a Lancashire mill town run on utilitarian principles. In the character of Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens stigmatises the utilitarian philosophy that reduced children to numbers and education to facts. Mr Gradgrind was the founder of Coke Town School and ‘a man of realities’ and ‘a man of fact and calculations’. In the opening passages of Hard Times, Gradgrind outlines his philosophy behind educating children:

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 out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts sir!

Thomas Gradgrind had directed these remarks to his newly trained teacher, Mr M’Choakumchild. The national training of teachers was in its early stages and Dickens was critical of its over-emphasis on knowledge and facts and feared that teachers were systematically extinguishing creative and imaginative qualities in children.

http://dickens.port.ac.uk/education/