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Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now Utopia & Education UTS 23.2_01_Wagner.indd 299 08/11/12 7:12 AM Figure used with kind permission of Pie: The Search for Utopia (http://pieonedotzero.wordpress.com). UTS 23.2_01_Wagner.indd 300 08/11/12 7:12 AM Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor I. The Allegory of the Circus Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is not a novel that typically springs to mind in the context of discussions of education in utopia or dystopia. But maybe it should be. Hard Times stages a er fi ce debate between utopic and dystopic visions of nineteenth-century Britain and the future that it prepares its children for. On one side: Mr. Gradgrind and his school, with a sclerotic curriculum of “Facts, facts, facts” that hardens the heart and the mind and stamps out any spark of imagination. Gradgrind “manufactures,” like identical widgets, model citizens in the form of the apathetic Bitzer. On the other side: Mr. Sleary and his traveling circus, with an endlessly inventive but also skoriented ills- curriculum. The circus regards the associative knowledge that imagination makes possible as more valuable than the discrete facts and supposedly objec- tive truths that rationality provides. Learning takes place in the heart, in the ring, and on the road, not http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Utopian Studies Penn State University Press

Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now

Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A.
Utopian Studies , Volume 23 (2) – Nov 25, 2012
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Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Utopian Studies
ISSN
2154-9648

Abstract

Utopia & Education UTS 23.2_01_Wagner.indd 299 08/11/12 7:12 AM Figure used with kind permission of Pie: The Search for Utopia (http://pieonedotzero.wordpress.com). UTS 23.2_01_Wagner.indd 300 08/11/12 7:12 AM Introduction: Something About the Way We Live Now Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor I. The Allegory of the Circus Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is not a novel that typically springs to mind in the context of discussions of education in utopia or dystopia. But maybe it should be. Hard Times stages a er fi ce debate between utopic and dystopic visions of nineteenth-century Britain and the future that it prepares its children for. On one side: Mr. Gradgrind and his school, with a sclerotic curriculum of “Facts, facts, facts” that hardens the heart and the mind and stamps out any spark of imagination. Gradgrind “manufactures,” like identical widgets, model citizens in the form of the apathetic Bitzer. On the other side: Mr. Sleary and his traveling circus, with an endlessly inventive but also skoriented ills- curriculum. The circus regards the associative knowledge that imagination makes possible as more valuable than the discrete facts and supposedly objec- tive truths that rationality provides. Learning takes place in the heart, in the ring, and on the road, not

Journal

Utopian Studies – Penn State University Press

Published: Nov 25, 2012

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