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Quote 1. “"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. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!" Explanation and Analysis. In the opening scene of the novel, we're introduced to a thoroughly unpleasant character, Thomas Gradgrind. Gradgrind is a schoolteacher, but he has none of the affection or whimsy one might associate with someone who teaches kids. Instead, Gradgrind is harsh and stern—he essentially treats his students like adults, or even like machines. Gradgrind emphasizes the importance of facts in education: learning, he argues, is all about mastering an unchanging set of pieces of information. Gradgrind's view of education is absurd for a number of reasons. It holds no appeal for an imaginative author like Charles Dickens--it was creativity, not command of information, that made Dickens successful. Gradgrind has often been interpreted as the embodiment of 19th century Utilitarianism, the economic and political doctrine that emphasized quantity and mathematical precision in all things. In the 19th century, England became a mechanized, industrialized society--as Dickens sees it, Gradgrind is exemplary of the country's shift toward information, numbers, and figures--a shift that made England powerful but also heartless.