Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

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  DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR

  by

  JAMES L. HUGHES

  Inspector of Schools, TorontoAuthor of Froebel's Educational LawsMistakes in Teaching, etc.

  New York and LondonD. Appleton and Company1913

  Copyright, 1900,by D. Appleton and Company.

  Electrotyped and Printedat the Appleton Press, U.S.A.

  EDITOR'S PREFACE.

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

  The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but hehas all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developedbest by a treatment which takes for granted the child's preference toadopt 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 onesand some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as alever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good inthe child's disposition and endeavours to build on it a self-respectwhich may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct.Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced toinjudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or thecommunity. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in thesethree directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and thenext succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricaturedthem with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that wesee at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.

  Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so hasShakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry andmade them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he hasattacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family inthe boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninterestinginstruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know shouldbe made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be consideredincompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads ofdaily experience and present interest to which he can attach every pointthat the regular lesson contains.

  Dickens has done a great work in directing the attention of society to itspublic institutions--especially to its orphan asylums and poorhouses. Thechill which the infant gets when it comes in direct contact with theformality of a state institution, or even a religious institution, withoutthe mediation of the family, is portrayed so well that every reader ofDickens feels it by sympathy. So, too, in those families of public men orwomen or in those of the directors of industry or commerce who crush outthe true family life by bringing home their unrelaxing business mannersand trying to regulate the family as they regulate the details of a greatbusiness house--the reading world has imbibed a sympathy for the rights ofthe home. Free childhood and the culture of individuality has become awatchword.

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

  The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, andDickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned asentirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason forits existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead ofrevolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets soheated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what isfundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removalof a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer rendersnecessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educationalmethod from one extreme to another.

  Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he doesnot share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apartand alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in thenineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by allwho have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day andgeneration.

  W. T. HARRIS.

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