The New Gradgrinds

“Now what I want is, Facts. Teach the boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else…Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities.”

So Charles Dickens began his novel Hard Times. Thomas Gradgrind is a marvelously cruel and distorted caricature of a follower of the utilitarian social thinker Jeremy Bentham. Gradgrind sees numbers instead of people. Dickens himself, one of the greatest chroniclers o...