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"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them."

My reading of theories of pedagogy and knowledge development usually is quite separate from my reading of fiction for the pure pleasure of being human!

But now recently I have come across several references to the wonderful Dickensian caricature of positivism with the suggestive name of Gradgrind. There is a war going on in the world of schooling, with a clear front between those who are in favour of the measurable fact-based model that fictional Gradgrind tried on his own environment, with quite heartbreaking results, and those who have interpreted the opposite of Gradgrindianism as the way forward, and claim that inquiry, creativity and transferable skills are the pillars of education, and that facts are obsolete before they enter the heads of the suffering child vessels.

Now I am quite sure that Dickens could have written a brilliant satire on the extreme opposite of Gradgrind's pedagogy if he had seen it in action. How are children to develop ideas if they have no knowledge to get inspired by? How are they going to proceed in inquiry if they have no basic understanding of the scientific concepts? How are they going to create exciting and artistic visual and textual artefacts without the literacy skills that are the tools leading towards linguistic and artistic mastery? How are they going to "research" a history topic independently that they have never heard of before, and definitely cannot put into context?

As happy as I am whenever Gradgrind shows up in the educational debates, I have to say that his very presence as a negative example of old-school knowledge is an ironic symbol of the value of "knowing" the iconic history of literary or scientific reference points. If you haven't had some kind of basic schooling in literature, you won't understand what Gradgrind's evil represents: to evaluate his mentioning in the school debate, you have to know about Victorian standpoints, Dickens' position within them, Gradgrind's failure, and educational theories over the past century that have swung like a pendulum from one extreme to the other.

So cheers to the fact that facts are part of life - and the devil is in the PART!