235 Galdós, more than any other of the great novelists apart from Proust, is a moralist. We see this not in his comments---for he rarely makes any---but in his choice of themes. He had a very clear picture in his mind of the social and political vices of Spanish society and every one of his novels is devoted to the analysis and portrayal of one or more of them. (Brenan, Literature 391)
Galdós‘s projects on to the period of 1863-64 of El doctor Centeno his conviction of the 1880s, the time of his writing, that education was the key to putting Spaniards in contact with common sense and reality, so clearly enunciated in the epigraph and epilogue to La desheredada. This conviction is continued in the first half of the bipartite El doctor Centeno, fueled by the belief that education was also a remedy for social ills,
Education was the nineteenth-century panacea for social ills: education of the right sort would produce responsible individuals who would contribute to the moral, intellectual and material advancement of society and it would ensure social stability by saving the working classes from crime and revolution. (Scanlon, Centeno 23)
This ideal is undermined in the first half of the novel, however, in which Polo‘s brutal system of traditional, rote learning is exposed by Galdós with Dickensian vividness not only for its uselessness but also for the conservative complacency of parents who, knowing no better, favor it for their children. The rational and modern alternative is left to the isolated cesante, Jesús Delgado, who goes mad trying to persuade his betters in the Dirección de Instrucción Pública of the superiority of the new teaching