Success Academies’ No-Excuses Charters: Today’s Dickensian Cram Schools
I am a great fan of the later novels of Charles Dickens—Bleak House, Great Expectations andOur Mutual Friend, but 40 years ago, when I read Hard Times, the fable seemed so overdone as to be far-fetched. When I picked up this 1854 novel again last week, however, I discovered that these days, its critique seems hardly over the top at all. Hard Times is Dickens’ critique of inequality in a mid-19th century English mill town, of authoritarian schools that drill utilitarian economic theory, and of the social Darwinist ethic that celebrates the individual and the success of the self-made man. Bounderby, Dickens’ bullying One Percenter, like Donald Trump, creates a fictitious story of a humble origin as a means of promoting the myth of his rise on his own merits. And Thomas Gradgrind, the proprietor of the novel’s school, prefigures his modern counterpart, Eva Moskowitz.
As I watched the video on the NY Times website last Friday of a teacher at one of the “no-excuses” Success Academy Charter Schools run by Eva Moskowitz—this particular school in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, I thought of Thomas Gradgrind’s school. The video exposes a first grade teacher berating and insulting a girl who has become confused while trying to explain her math paper after the teacher has demanded that the child present her work to the class. When the six-year-old is unable to describe her work, the teacher grabs the child’s paper, rips it in pieces, and humiliates the little girl in front of her classmates.
Dickens’ second chapter, titled “Murdering the Innocents,” begins with a definition of utilitarian education, the children described as “little pitchers… who were to be filled so full of facts.” Never mind their hearts. “Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts Success Academies’ No-Excuses Charters: Today’s Dickensian Cram Schools | janresseger: