Dickens As an Educator Part 14

There are Feeders yet who profane the temple of literature; who never connect the souls of their pupils with the soul life of the authors they study. Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art of loving literature for its beauty and enn.o.bling thought, fewer still have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to trans.m.u.te the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations.

We may yet learn from d.i.c.kens.

Tozer became an antique pedant, learned but not educated.

Briggs grew to be dull and heavy-witted, and had his "knowledge so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted."

Bitherstone was one of the few fortunate fellows who are gifted with natural power to pa.s.s through the cramming system without being affected seriously in any way. They get little, if any, good, and they speedily forget the wrongs inflicted upon them and the learning with which their teachers attempted to cram them.

Briggs showed the evil effects of cramming in the destruction of individuality. "His fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining."

This is one of the general charges made against Doctor Blimber's forcing establishment, or hothouse. "Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other." The destruction of selfhood was the great evil of the old system of teaching.

Another important criticism made by d.i.c.kens of the hothouse system is worthy of special attention by educators. He recognised the evil effects of giving any study or work to children, that is naturally adapted to a later stage of their development. The development of children is always arrested when the work of a higher stage is forced into a lower stage of their growth. The true evolution of the child consists in a growth through a series of progressive and interdependent stages. This was not recognised in the educational system d.i.c.kens desired to improve. It is not yet recognised to a very large extent in practice. "All the boys blew before their time," in Doctor Blimber's school. "The doctor, in some partial confusion of ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up."

d.i.c.kens was so careful to make his names and terms express volumes of meaning that he probably meant the phrase "mathematical gooseberries" to be especially significant. The fact that they were grown on "mere sprouts of bushes," and as a consequence were "very sour ones, too," reveals the philosophy since made so clear by Doctor Harris, that early "drilling" in arithmetic has been one of the prolific causes of arrested development in children. The appeal against the common practice of growing "every description of Greek and Latin vegetable" _from_ "_dry twigs of boys_" was comprehensive and timely. They were not merely twigs, but dry twigs in whom the sap had not begun to circulate freely. No expressions, no volumes, could state the evil of untimely cramming more clearly than this group of phrases used by d.i.c.kens in describing Doctor Blimber's school.

"The frostiest circ.u.mstances" is another of the thought-laden phrases, which was evidently intended to warn teachers against the mistake of trying to produce any intellectual fruit at untimely periods of the child's development. "Wintry growth" means unseasonable or untimely development.

The condemnation of the feeling shown by Paul in parting from Florence, and the Doctor's cold-blooded observation, "Never mind; we shall subst.i.tute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly," were intended to show how utterly the knowledge cramming ideal had prevented the recognition of the fundamental fact that feeling is the basis and the battery power of intellectual force and energy. The same principle is taught by Cornelia's shock at Paul's affection for old Glubb, and her father's summary settlement of the case, when he realized that the little child was intensely affectionate and sympathetic. "Ha!" said the Doctor, shaking his head, "this--is--bad, but study will do much."

d.i.c.kens deals in a most thorough manner with the absolute wickedness of neglecting, or attempting to smother feeling in the training and education of children in Hard Times. He undoubtedly received his clear conceptions relating to the intellectual value of feeling from Froebel's writings.

The bad effects of cramming on the physical const.i.tution of children are pointed out in "the convulsive grasping of their foreheads" by the two boys engaged in solving mathematical problems. Nervous exhaustion is here plainly indicated. They were "very feverish," too, and poor Briggs was in even a worse condition, for "he was in a state of stupefaction and was flabby and quite cold." Both Briggs and Tozer frightened Paul the first night he tried to sleep in their room by talking Latin and Greek in their dreams. Paul thought they were swearing. Education should never interfere with a child's sleep, either with its soundness or its duration. Even the boys told Paul on the first day of his school life that he would need a good const.i.tution to withstand the strain at Doctor Blimber's.

The exhaustive and exasperating practice of piling up arrears of work, so naturally connected with cramming--in fact, so essential a part of the unnatural process--comes in for its share of condemnation, too. One of the boys, "whose face was like a dirty window, from much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines." The friends of Briggs were constantly in terror "lest they should find his hat floating on a pond and an unfinished exercise on the bank."

The same practice of charging up arrears of work is condemned in David Copperfield by a.s.sociating it with the hateful Murdstones.

The crammer's absolute indifference and contempt for any semblance of correlation in studies is revealed by Cornelia's action in giving him a collection of books on his first morning before school with instructions to study them at the places she had marked for him. No wonder that "when poor Paul had spelled out number two he found he had no idea of number one; fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three, which sidled into number four, which grafted itself on to number two--so that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus, a bull, were open questions with him."

Whenever words are given before thought, or as a subst.i.tute for thought, and without definite relations.h.i.+p to the thought already in the mind, they lie in the mind as unrelated, and therefore unavailable knowledge.

A boy in London had received considerable historical teaching, and his mind had made a certain kind of unity out of the confused ma.s.s. When asked at his final examination "What he knew about Cromwell," he answered: "Cromwell interfered with the Irish, and he was put in prison. When he was in prison he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, and he afterward married Mrs.

O'Shea."

This was equalled by the other boy who wrote at an examination: "Wolsey was a famous general who fought in the Crimean War, and who, after being decapitated several times, said to Cromwell: 'If I had served you as you have served me I would not have been deserted in my old age.'"

Paul's studies were always dark and crooked to him till Florence bought copies of his books and studied them, and by patient sympathy made all that had been dark light, and all that had been crooked straight.

The habit of giving definitions of abstractions to children, and expecting the definitions alone to be comprehended by children, is held up to deserved ridicule in the explanation of the word "a.n.a.lysis" to Paul, when Cornelia proposed to read the a.n.a.lysis of his character.

"If my recollection serves me, the word a.n.a.lysis, as opposed to synthesis, is thus defined by Walker: 'The resolution of an object, whether of the senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.' As opposed to synthesis, you observe. _Now_ you know what a.n.a.lysis is, Dombey."

How perfectly simple and clear and expanding this would be to a child's mind! d.i.c.kens says: "Dombey didn't seem absolutely blinded by the light let in upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow."

What loose habits of thought, and how much hypocrisy and mental vagueness are caused by using words instead of realities in the early teaching of children, and then asking them if they understand what we have been telling them! The "little bow" has usually a demoralizing effect.

It is a mere farce to call the committing to memory of definitions "education."

Whatever the subjects, it is a dwarfing process, whether the definitions are memorized at home or at school, silently, by oral repet.i.tion, or by singing them. All definition learning as the origin of thought is certain to destroy interest and arrest development and lead to inaccuracy of thought. Miss Le Row's collection of blunders made by children could never have been made if the children had been taught properly.

Such mistakes as "The body is mostly composed of water, and about one half of avaricious tissue" or "Parasite, a kind of umbrella," or "Emphasis, putting more distress on one word than on another," should suggest to teachers the absurdity of committing definitions to memory. It is one of the weakest forms of cramming, and is most ridiculous and least useful when the memorizing is done by simultaneous oral repet.i.tion.

Hard Times exposes the evils of cramming in the teaching practised in the normal school in which Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild was trained, and in the definition repet.i.tion as given by Bitzer, and so highly praised by Mr.

Gradgrind:

"Bitzer, your definition of a horse:"

"Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth."

How clear this would make the conception of a horse to a man who had never seen one! Sissy Jupe, too, is used to show the failure of cramming to educate a girl of quick intellect and strong emotions. She could not be crammed.

M'Choak.u.mchild reported that she had a very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates, unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process) immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteenpence half-penny; that she was as low down in the school as low as could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of political economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high, for returning to the question, "What is the first principle of this science?" the absurd answer, "To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me."

Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad; that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular statements A to Z; and that Jupe "must be kept to it." So Jupe was kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.

d.i.c.kens makes the artist in Somebody's Luggage say:

"Who are you pa.s.sing every day at your compet.i.tive excruciations? The fortunate candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside down for life? Not you, you are really pa.s.sing the crammers and coaches."

And Jemmy Lirriper, in describing his teacher, said: "Oh, he was a Tartar!

Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month, lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing everything in the world out of a book."

d.i.c.kens saw the evils of compet.i.tive examinations more clearly than many educators do two generations after him.

When educators in schools, colleges, and universities learn a better way to promote pupils, to cla.s.sify men and women and to rank them at graduation, than by holding promotion and graduation examinations cramming will be of no use, and there shall be no more cramming.

d.i.c.kens was right as usual. The crammers and coaches are those who are tested by "compet.i.tive excruciations"; and how those who force through most students boast and strut and lord it over the less successful crammers and coaches on commencement days and other public occasions! What a misleading mockery examinations are as tests of power and character!

Few even of d.i.c.kens's phrases contain such a condensation of fact and philosophy as the phrase "whose heads and livers you have turned upside down for life." Few phrases deserve more careful consideration from educators.

d.i.c.kens makes the effect on the head still more startling by the description of Miss Wozenham's brother in Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy. "Miss Wozenham out of her small income had to support a brother that had had the misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics."

In the same story he laughs at the practical results of language cramming usually done in the schools:

And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I says "Noncomprenny, you're very kind but it's no use--Now Jemmy!" and then Jemmy he fires away at 'em lovely, the only thing wanting in Jemmy's French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever understood a word of what they said to him, which made it scarcely of the use it might have been.

d.i.c.kens attempted to picture the feelings of a boy toward his teachers in the days when cramming was almost universally practised in the story of Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Redforth, aged nine. When the Latin master was captured, he was saved by Captain Boldheart from the punishment of death to which he was condemned by the crew of The Beauty. Captain Boldheart had been one of his pupils, and he said: "Without taking your life, I must yet forever deprive you of the power of spiting other boys. I shall turn you adrift in this boat. You will find in her two oars, a compa.s.s, a bottle of rum, a small cask of water, a piece of pork, a bag of biscuit, and my Latin grammar. Go! and spite the natives if you can find any."

When he afterward released him from the savages who were about to eat him, he granted him his life for the second time on condition:

"1. That he should never under any circ.u.mstances presume to teach any boy anything any more.

"2. That, if taken back to England, he should pa.s.s his life in travelling to find out boys who wanted their exercises done, and should do their exercises for nothing, and never say a word about it."

When it finally became necessary to hang the Latin master, Boldheart "impressively pointed out to him that this is what spiters come to."

There are many kinds of cram that yet pa.s.s as fairly respectable in schools and universities. When the teachers or the professors give notes to be copied by the pupils and memorized, they are cramming. When teachers are storing the memories of children with facts, tables, dates, etc., to be used at some future time, they are cramming. All memorizing by repet.i.tion of words, even if they are understood, is cram, if the pupil can work the thought into his life by repet.i.tion of process or of operation. Words can never take the place of self-activity, nor even of activity.

So long as knowledge storing is placed above character development, examinations by "examiners" will retain their power for evil, and so long as such examinations are held cramming will continue.