Chapter I: Front Matter

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DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR

by

JAMES L. HUGHES

Inspector of Schools, Toronto Author of Froebel's Educational Laws Mistakes in Teaching, etc.

New York and London D. Appleton and Company 1913

Copyright, 1900, by D. Appleton and Company.

Electrotyped and Printed at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

The following pages are sufficient to establish the claim of Mr. Hughes for Dickens as an educational reformer--the greatest that England has produced. It will be admitted that he has done more than any one else to secure for the child a considerate treatment of his tender age. "It is a crime against a child to rob it of its childhood." This principle was announced by Dickens, and it has come to be generally recognised and adopted. Gradually it is changing the methods of primary instruction and bringing into vogue a milder form of discipline and a more stimulative teaching--arousing the child's self-activity instead of repressing it.

The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but he has all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developed best by a treatment which takes for granted the child's preference to adopt what is good rather than what is bad in social customs and usages.

The child, it is true, is uneven in his proclivities, having some bad ones and some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as a lever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good in the child's disposition and endeavours to build on it a self-respect which may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct. Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced to injudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or the community. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in these three directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and the next succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricatured them with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that we see at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.

Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so has Shakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry and made them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he has attacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family in the boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninteresting instruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know should be made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be considered incompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads of daily experience and present interest to which he can attach every point that the regular lesson contains.

Dickens has done a great work in directing the attention of society to its public institutions--especially to its orphan asylums and poorhouses. The chill which the infant gets when it comes in direct contact with the formality of a state institution, or even a religious institution, without the mediation of the family, is portrayed so well that every reader of Dickens feels it by sympathy. So, too, in those families of public men or women or in those of the directors of industry or commerce who crush out the true family life by bringing home their unrelaxing business manners and trying to regulate the family as they regulate the details of a great business house--the reading world has imbibed a sympathy for the rights of the home. Free childhood and the culture of individuality has become a watchword.

Above all, Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizing children. Corporal punishment has diminished to one fourth of its former amount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes its potency. In fact, the habit of finding in the good tendencies of the child the levers with which to move him to the repression of his bad impulses has placed in the hands of the professional teacher the means of governing the child without appeal to force except in the rarest cases.

The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, and Dickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned as entirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason for its existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead of revolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets so heated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what is fundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removal of a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer renders necessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educational method from one extreme to another.

Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he does not share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apart and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all who have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day and generation.

W. T. HARRIS.

WASHINGTON, D. C., _October 12, 1900_.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

This book has two purposes: to prove that Dickens was the great apostle of the "new education" to the English-speaking world, and to bring into connected form, under appropriate headings, the educational principles of one of the world's greatest educators, and one of its two most sympathetic friends of childhood.

Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He was one of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and his revelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritual destitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest which ultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.

He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In the twenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of his army of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly every form of bad training resulting from ignorance, selfishness, indifference, unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No other writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment, and ill usage of childhood.

He is the most distinctive champion of the rights of childhood. He struck the bravest blows against corporal punishment, and against all forms of coercive tyranny toward the child in homes, institutions, and schools, even condemning the dogmatic will control of such a placid, Christian woman as Mrs. Crisparkle. He demanded a free, real, joyous childhood, rich in all a child's best experiences and interests, so that "childhood may ripen in childhood." He pleaded for the development of the individuality of each child. He taught the wisdom of giving a child proper food, and he showed the vital importance of real sympathy with the child, not mere consideration for him. He was the English father of true reverence for the child.

But Dickens studied the methods of cultivating the minds of children, as well as their character development. He exposed the evils of cramming more vigorously than any other writer. He taught the essential character of the imagination in intellectual and spiritual development. He showed the need of correlation of studies, and of apperceptive centres of feeling and thought in order to comprehend, and assimilate, and transform into definite power the knowledge and thought that is brought to our minds.

It is said by some, who see but the surface of the work of Dickens, that his work is done. Much of the good work for which he lived has been done, but much more remains to be done. Men are but beginning the work of child study and of rational education. The twentieth century will understand Dickens better than the nineteenth has understood him. His profound philosophy is only partially comprehended yet, even by the leaders in educational work. Teachers and all students of childhood will find in his true feeling and rich thought revelation and inspiration.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I.--THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS 1

II.--INFANT GARDENS 15

III.--THE OVERTHROW OF COERCION 29

IV.--THE DOCTRINE OF CHILD DEPRAVITY 87

V.--CRAMMING 96

VI.--FREE CHILDHOOD 117

VII.--INDIVIDUALITY 128

VIII.--THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION 136

IX.--SYMPATHY WITH CHILDHOOD 162

X.--CHILD STUDY AND CHILD NATURE 181

XI.--BAD TRAINING 188

XII.--GOOD TRAINING 218

XIII.--COMMUNITY 235

XIV.--NUTRITION AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION 244

XV.--MINOR SCHOOLS 258

XVI.--MISCELLANEOUS EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 285

XVII.--THE TRAINING OF POOR, NEGLECTED, AND DEFECTIVE CHILDREN 304

DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.