[Essay] hard times and jane eyre compare and contrast educational situtations

The educational situations in the stories of Hard Times and Jane Eyre are bad and both authors are criticizing them. Dickens writes a social critique of utilitarianism and Charlotte Brontë about the treatment of poor girls in boarding schools at that time. Both take place in England. Dickens and Brontë write social critiques about the educational systems in that time.

The stories are about two different schools in which the form of education, which they thought was right, was wrong. In Hard Times, the teachers didn’t accept individual expression they were totally against imagination. They asked just for facts and anything else was wrong, this was called utilitarianism. In Jane Eyre, there were two kinds of teachers, the ones that scolded everything and the ones that never punished. Both kinds are wrong, students don’t learn the right way. The bad conditions of boarding schools make education more difficult. In both stories the educational situation was wrong and needed to change.

Hard Times is about a school in which there is a professor, Mr. Gradgrind, who doesn’t like personal opinions or anything that is not just facts. There’s a girl, Sissy, who answers right but the teachers don’t like her because she has imagination. They like boys like Bitzer who (as described) is cold blooded, as if his imagination was dead. Mr. Gradgrind liked Bitzer because he answered with just facts as he wanted.

Jane Eyre is about a boarding school called Lowood in de 1800’s. There went poor girls and the conditions were really bad. There was no heating, they gave the girls few food and very bad one. The teachers didn’t know how to teach. There was one, Ms. Scatcherd, who only saw the bad things and was always pointing out the mistakes some girls did, she didn’t reward them for their good work, instead, she punished them by hitting them with twigs. The other teacher, Ms. Temple, was the contrary. She never scolded anything and was always complimenting the good things about the girls. Both kinds of teaching are wrong and is what Brontë wanted to express by writing about Lowood and the other boarding schools in the 1800’s.

Jane Eyre and Hard Times are both a social critique of the educational system. Both authors think the ways they were teaching and treating children were wrong and wanted to do something about it. Dickens wanted to encourage imagination and Charlotte B. wanted to change the conditions and treatment in boarding schools. The stories are a way of expressing this disagreement to the educational situations of both establishments.