Thomas Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, is obsessed with unambiguous facts and numbers. When I asked a press officer at HMRC for an estimate of how many “open cases” it plans to write off, ...

Thomas Gradgrind - from Hard Times - is one of Charles Dickens's coldest characters and is the twelth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters. Granada's critically acclaimed ...

ON April 8 we were told it would take #510m to set up in a free Scotland the kind of DSS bureaucracy we thole today. Surely the real question is why not simplify and streamline social security ...

Children with special educational needs are being excluded to boost exam results. That’s not a healthy approach There was a boy in my rural primary school who we used to tease as the village idiot. He ...

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.… ...

So Michael Gove is shocked that state school pupils are not being inculcated with a love of literature (Number taking GCSE in English literature falls, 29 April). As an English teacher in one of those ...

Mr. Gradgrind is the alter ego of Paul Brians, professor of English at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, who sets out to provide specific, concrete answers to life's rhetorical ...

In Guyana education once deteriorated to the point where parents had little confidence that the formal system would or could produce results. This created a condition in which parental paranoia ...

Easter is traditionally the time for one or other of the teaching unions — why are there so many of them? — to behave like March hares and carry on as if education, education, education, out of which ...

Suddenly, Nigeria is literally drowning in an avalanche of facts and figures on every aspect of the National Condition. There was a time, not long ago, when you could hardly hold on to anything about ...

For at least the last couple of decades, education ministers from around the world have been in thrall to a ‘back-to-basics’ educational philosophy. They have preached the time-honoured virtues of ...