A review by bsmorris
Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Jeff Nunokawa, Gage McWeeny

4.0

I should no longer be surprised that the classics are still so relevant - after all, that's what I try to show my students every day. Hard Times, however, was surprisingly relevant to the education profession in this age of struggle over whether art, languages, music, and other topics are still worthy of study, or whether we ought to merely prepare students narrowly for the professions we somehow divine for them. This is exactly the conflict at the center of this novel, and Dickens certainly has an opinion. I agree with him that education is more than merely churning out workers for factories and corporations. Education enriches a person's life, and helps people to understand a purpose in life beyond helping some boss make a lot of money. I recommend this book for anyone who doubts this about education.