The text I am going to analyze, Murdering the innocents, is an extract taken from Hard Times by Charles Dickens.
By looking at the title the reader, knowing Charles Dickens' novels, may expect the chapter to be about children exploitation or children's conditions in school.
The scene opens in Grandring's school. Sir Thomas Grandring is a teacher who is presented as a mental limited person. The first paragraph reveals his education philosophy based only on facts and his detached worldview accentuated by the fact that he considers people as numbers ("number twenty").
The catechism approach, distinguishing of the Victorian education, encourages memorization without acquiring true knowledge. That is why Bitzer can provide a detailed physical description of a horse ("Quadruped, Graminivorus, Forty teeth...") without seeing the emotional side while on the other hand, Sissy, who has grown up around horses ( her father "belongs to the horse-riding") is unable to describe a horse because her definition would be based on personal experience. Once again, by showing the two points of view, Charles Dickens puts in results all the contraddictions of his time but more important he underlines the impossibility to express what you think in the Victorian Age.
Through descriptions of the characters, Dickens illustrates facets of their personality.  Mr. M'Choakumchild, whose name defines his metaphorical role in the novel, has a "wall of a forehead" and "two dark caves" for eyes.  The description portrays him as an unemotional, soulless man whose job as an educator is to "choke" the life out of children through education.  He tells Sissy Jupe, "You mustn't fancy," discouraging the imagination and essentially killing any creativity that does not reflect reality.  The prohibition of unrealistic scenes on wallpaper or carpets shows his intolerance of an idealistic vision that sees beyond human capability.  His proclamation of "Fact, fact, fact!" constricts the tendency in youths to envision the impossible.
Bitzer is one of Gradgrind's model students who wholly embraces the acquisition of facts as knowledge.  Dickens points out his "cold eyes" to give the reader a sense of his frigid callousness.  His light eyes, hair, and complexion Dickens credits to his lack of exposure to the sun, thereby illustrating an absence of true enlightenment.

"The boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white."
The description above paints Bitzer as lacking basic human qualities, which have been choked out through the educational system in which he has been placed.  Additionally, he grasps facts easily but shows no compassion throughout the novel.
Bitzer's antithesis is Sissy Jupe, whose dark features portray an inborn liveliness that has not yet been extinguished.  Throughout the novel, Sissy inspires Louisa with her sympathetic nature and human compassion.  Her unyielding devotion to her father, despite his abandoning her, shows the strength of human attachment in the midst of a system that promotes pathetic estrangement.
Dickens' naming of the second chapter "Murdering the Innocents" limns children as victims of the system put in place by Gradgrind and others.  The system has no tolerance of fantastical imaginings or representations, turning children into machines, like those used in the factory that appears later in the novel.  Individuality has been sacrificed for a collective indoctrination that inhibits human progress.  The irony of the situation is that without imagination, those machines in the factories could never have been invented.  Nevertheless, Dickens gives the reader hope that while the imagination can be stunted, it can never been completely extinguished:

"When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him!"