It has become one of those common place go-to riffs in education reform. Not quite up there with “education is broken” or that bloody Ferris Beuller video. But if you’re listening to someone with pretensions of a literary background you may well catch an earful of that classic indictment of useless educators:
“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”
If you are lucky, you may be introduced to the fact that the character speaking is named Gradgrind and the book is Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times“. Gradgrind, of course, wasn’t a teacher – this was the charmingly named Mr M’Choakumchild – nor had he any real reason to be in the school at that point.
For what is (to my mind) one of Dickens’ more incisive and political books it is not often read. Certainly it has it’s share of unexpected familial coincidences and grotesque characters, and naturally poverty is compared with the moneyed classes with a situationally unlikely set of instances of social mobility – but at heart it is a dystopian novel based on the excesses of a certain persuasion of utilitarianism.
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the Benthamite cry, and this led indirectly to Jeremy sitting in on UCL committee meetings more than 150 years after his death. But a great deal of the ongoing utilitarian work was finding reliable methods of identifying when people were happy, and the conditions that were preventing this.
There is a charming passage in Hard Times where Dickens reflects on the earnestly pursued data-driven diagnoses:
“[…] there was a native organisation in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main force. Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top moral specimen.”
The strikingly modern aspect of this, to me, is not just the reliance on “tabular statements” to define social and moral ills, but also the reliance on coercion and behavioural engineering based on these tabular statements.
Quite what conclusion I draw from this quote I’m not yet sure. But there is some link between the aggregation of quantified selves as data trails within a larger quantitatively driven policy process and the excesses of utilitarianism that Dickens was satirising.
And you should (re)read “Hard Times”. Because it strikes home regarding the almost unnameable something that austerity-battered populations cling to that is almost the precise opposite of data-driven policy making.
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