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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Bored pupils will play truant from school if Education Secretary Michael Gove goes ahead with his planned new “back to basics” national curriculum, teachers warned today. The new syllabus was ...

So many of life's questions seem never to be answered. Are we alone? Why are we here? What's it all about, Alfie? But one man has set out to provide specific, concrete answers to life's rhetorical ...