ABSTRACT
CHARLES DICKENS published Hard Times inLondon in 1854, over 150 years ago. In theopening paragraphs, he describes with raging fidelity the first harsh lesson drummed into the heads of unsuspecting new teachers:
This fraught description of nineteenth-century English schooling sounds weirdly resonant, curiously close at hand, quite a lot like the school world we teachers face right here, right now. One would think that education
and schooling in a modern contemporary democracy would look remarkably different from the tyrannical classrooms of Great Britain under the rule of Queen Victoria. Monarchies, after all, demand fealty first and foremost, whereas democracies, at least theoretically, are built on the active engagement and participation of a free and enlightened people. And because schools-no matter where or when-are always a mirror and window into whatever social order created and sustains them, we can easily imagine the society that the above-mentioned “imperial gallons of facts” are meant to sustain and reproduce; what’s harder to reconcile is the oddly familiar feeling of that autocratic classroom picture-and the brute logic behind it-in our own democratic society and our modern classroom contexts.
