Beyond Facts and Formulas

Humanist Resistance in Dickens’ Hard Times and Hirani’s 3 Idiots

Abstract

The paper undertakes a comparative study of utilitarian models of education as dramatized in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854) and Rajkumar Hirani’s film 3 Idiots (2009). While Dickens’s Coketown and the pedagogical regime embodied by Thomas Gradgrind dramatize Victorian utilitarian pedagogy—reducing children to “facts” and instrumentalising education for industrial capital—Hirani’s ICE (Imperial College of Engineering) functions as a contemporary metonym for an Indian technocratic regime that privileges measurable performance, credentialism, and the attainment of economic ends. Reading these texts alongside classical utilitarian theory, contemporary educational criticism, and recent scholarship on both works, it is being argued that both narratives stage similar ethical and pedagogical failures arising from reductive, consequentialist educational logics: the repression of imagination, the erosion of individual agency, and severe social and psychological harm. Yet both of these texts also articulate different modes of resistance. Whereas Dickens does this through caricature, moral reform, and the restorative state of human feeling, Hirani through satire, humanist comedy, and an insistence on the primacy of vocation and intrinsic motivation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the persistence of utilitarian rationales in modern higher education and the implications of these literary/filmic critiques for current debates about assessment, meritocracy, and the purposes of learning.