Letter

In response to Beijing warns foreign media in Hong Kong over crossing ‘red lines’

Hard Times

Les Macdonald’s recent letter covering the Wang Fuk Court tragedy in Honk Kong entitled ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ left me reflecting on Thomas Gradgrind, the fictional character and notorious school board superintendent in Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

The rigid and persistent pedagogue was obsessed with cold facts and numbers, and his adolescent pupils were treated as machines, or pitchers which were to be filled to the brim with facts.

Replication and transfer of data is not learning. It is merely indoctrination, and the conundrum is discussed extensively by Henry Giroux and the late Paulo Freire.

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics and as Albert Einstein once proclaimed:

“Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.”

— Bernartd Corden from Spring Hill QLD 4000