Dickens As an Educator Part 13

At dinner no boy was allowed to speak; every one was compelled to listen to the tedious discourse of Doctor Blimber on the customs of the Romans.

The cramming of youth was continued with great dignity even during meals.

One boy, Johnson, was unfortunate enough to choke himself by too suddenly swallowing his water in order to catch Doctor Blimber's eye when he began an account of the dinners of Vitellius; and to punish him for his breach of manners, Doctor Blimber said before the boys were dismissed from the table:

"Johnson will repeat to-morrow morning before breakfast, without book, and from the Greek Testament, the first chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians. We will resume our studies, Mr. Feeder, in half an hour."

It used to be a common practice to cultivate a loving reverence for G.o.d by using the Bible as a means of punishment. This was in harmony with the old educational and the old theological ideal of punishment, as the supreme means available for guiding children properly. It was considered a perfectly appropriate use of the best book to use it for this best of purposes.

The young gentlemen bowed and withdrew; Mr. Feeder did likewise.

During the half hour the young gentlemen, broken into pairs, loitered arm in arm up and down a small piece of ground behind the house. But nothing happened so vulgar as play. Punctually at the appointed time the gong was sounded, and the studies, under the joint auspices of Doctor Blimber and Mr. Feeder, were resumed.

Tea was served in a style no less polite than dinner; and after tea the young gentlemen, rising and bowing as before, withdrew to fetch up the unfinished tasks of that day or to get up the already looming tasks of to-morrow. After prayers and light refreshments at eight o'clock or so, the "young gentlemen" were sent to bed by the doctor rising and solemnly saying, "We will resume our studies at seven to-morrow"; the pupils bowed again, and went to bed.

In the confidence of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it wasn't for his mother and a blackbird he had at home. Tozer didn't say much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he undressed himself moodily and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed too, and Paul in his bed too, before the weak-eyed young man appeared to take away the candle, when he wished them good-night and pleasant dreams. But his benevolent wishes were in vain as far as Briggs and Tozer were concerned; for Paul, who lay awake for a long while, and often woke afterward, found that Briggs was ridden by his lesson as a nightmare; and that Tozer, whose mind was affected in his sleep by similar causes, in a minor degree, talked unknown tongues, or sc.r.a.ps of Greek and Latin--it was all one to Paul--which, in the silence of night, had an inexpressibly wicked and guilty effect.

As Paul was going downstairs in the morning Miss Blimber called him into her room, and, pointing to a pile of new books on her table, said:

"These are yours, Dombey."

"All of 'em, ma'am?" said Paul.

"Yes," returned Miss Blimber; "and Mr. Feeder will look you out some more very soon, if you are as studious as I expect you will be, Dombey."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Paul.

"I am going out for a const.i.tutional," resumed Miss Blimber; "and while I am gone--that is to say, in the interval between this and breakfast, Dombey--I wish you to read over what I have marked in these books, and to tell me if you quite understand what you have got to learn. Don't lose time, Dombey, for you have none to spare, but take them downstairs, and begin directly."

"Yes, ma'am," answered Paul.

There were so many of them, that although Paul put one hand under the bottom book and his other hand and his chin on the top book, and hugged them all closely, the middle book slipped out before he reached the door, and then they all tumbled down on the floor. Having at last ama.s.sed the whole library and climbed into his place, he fell to work, encouraged by a remark from Tozer to the effect that he "was in for it now"; which was the only interruption he received till breakfast time.

At that meal, for which he had no appet.i.te, everything was quite as solemn and genteel as at the others; and when it was finished, he followed Miss Blimber upstairs.

"Now, Dombey," said Miss Blimber, "how have you got on with those books?"

They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin--names of things, declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and preliminary rules--a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three weights and measures, and a little general information. 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 slided 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.

"Oh, Dombey, Dombey!" said Miss Blimber, "this is very shocking."

So Paul's cramming went on day by day. The delicate little boy, who should not have been sent to school at all, was forced to memorize confused ma.s.ses of words that had no meaning to him, but he learned to repeat the words, and so got the credit of doing well, and because he learned easily was driven harder and harder. The more easily he carried his burden the higher it was piled on his back.

It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentlemen in general. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred; and the doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up.

Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen's nearest relations, and urged on by their blind vanity and ill-considered haste, it would have been strange if Doctor Blimber had discovered his mistake, or trimmed his swelling sails to any other tack.

Thus in the case of Paul. When Doctor Blimber said he made great progress, and was naturally clever, Mr. Dombey was more bent than ever on his being forced and crammed. In the case of Briggs, when Doctor Blimber reported that he did not make great progress yet, and was not naturally clever, Briggs senior was inexorable in the same purpose. In short, however high and false the temperature at which the doctor kept his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a helping hand at the bellows and to stir the fire.

When the midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen a.s.sembled at Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as "breaking up" would have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they never broke up. They would have scorned the action.

Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs.

Tozer, his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion that he couldn't be in that forward state of preparation too soon--Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought he would rather stay where he was, than go home. However inconsistent this declaration might appear with that pa.s.sage in Tozer's essay on the subject, wherein he had observed "that the thoughts of home and all its recollections awakened in his mind the most pleasing emotions of antic.i.p.ation and delight," and had also likened himself to a Roman general, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden with Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours' march of the Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the dwelling place of Mrs. Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it seemed that Tozer had a dreadful uncle, who not only volunteered examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the same fell purpose. So that if this uncle took him to the play, or, on a similar pretence of kindness, carried him to see a giant, or a dwarf, or a conjurer, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some cla.s.sical allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of mortal apprehension; not foreseeing where he might break out, or what authority he might not quote against him.

As to Briggs, _his_ father made no show of artifice about it. He never would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental trials of that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of the family (then resident near Bayswater, London) seldom approached the ornamental piece of water in Kensington Gardens without a vague expectation of seeing Master Briggs's hat floating on the surface and an unfinished exercise lying on the bank. Briggs, therefore, was not at all sanguine on the subject of holidays; and these two sharers of little Paul's bedroom were so fair a sample of the young gentlemen in general, that the most elastic among them contemplated the arrival of those festive periods with genteel resignation.

d.i.c.kens did not wish to lay all the blame for the stupid process of cramming on the teachers. He properly revealed to parents that they were even more to blame than the teachers, because they got what they demanded. Doctor Blimber summed up the whole philosophy of the adulthood of his time in regard to a child's education when he said to his daughter, "Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!"

The standard of knowledge cramming fixed by parents and school boards is changing very slowly. Even yet a teacher's success is measured and his chances of re-engagement decided in most places by the answer to the question, "How does he bring the children on?"

When asked by Doctor Blimber what he wished his little sickly son to learn, Mr. Dombey answered, "Oh, everything."

When Paul learned easily, his father pressed for more studies; and because Briggs was dull, his father demanded that he be driven harder at school, and made the poor boy's life miserable at home by tedious lessons during the holidays.

The uncle who made Tozer wretched by asking him unexpected questions on all occasions is a type of an ogre who sometimes blights the lives of children still.

d.i.c.kens had a beautiful sympathy with childhood in its sufferings not merely on account of deliberate cruelty and neglect, but because of the burdens placed upon it by adults who, with the best intentions, robbed it of its natural rights of joyousness and freedom.

Whenever Doctor Blimber was informed that Paul was "old-fashioned" or "peculiar," he said, as he had said when Paul first came, that study would do much; and he also said, as he said on that occasion, "Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!"

Just before the close of the term Paul fainted and had to be carried to his room, and after an examination the physician advised Doctor Blimber to "release the young gentleman from his books just now, the vacation being so near at hand."

It was so very considerate to release him from study, when he was utterly unable to study any longer.

At the close of the school party when he was leaving--

Cornelia, taking both Paul's hands in hers, said, "Dombey, Dombey, you have always been my favourite pupil. G.o.d bless you!" And it showed, Paul thought, how easily one might do injustice to a person; for Miss Blimber meant it--though she _was_ a Forcer.

Paul never returned to school. His life was sacrificed to his father's desire to have him "learn everything."

In a brief look at the results of Doctor Blimber's teaching, d.i.c.kens tersely outlines three common results of cramming:

Mr. Tozer, now a young man of lofty stature, in Wellington boots, was so extremely full of antiquity as to be nearly on a par with a genuine ancient Roman in his knowledge of English; a triumph that affected his good parents with the tenderest emotions, and caused the father and mother of Mr. Briggs (whose learning, like an ill-arranged luggage, was so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted) to hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered from the tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact, had been subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system had the happier and not uncommon effect of leaving no impression whatever, when the forcing apparatus ceased to work was in a much more comfortable plight; and being then on shipboard, bound for Bengal, found himself forgetting with such admirable rapidity, that it was doubtful whether his declensions of noun-substantives would hold out to the end of the voyage.

d.i.c.kens, in his very able description of Doctor Blimber's school, directs attention to nearly every phase of the evils of cramming. Toots is an ill.u.s.tration of the destruction of mental power by the "hard mathematics"

and other subjects, when they are taught improperly. It is a serious result of an educational system, when the brightest young men "cease to have brains when they begin to have whiskers."

Paul's experience is used to show the terrible physical evils of cramming in any life, especially in the life of a delicate child. Paul was killed by his father and Doctor Blimber. He should have lived.

Cornelia's aversion to live languages and her delight in "digging up the dead languages like a ghoul," and the address presented to Doctor Blimber "which contained very little of the mother tongue, but fifteen quotations from the Latin and seven from the Greek," were intended as a protest against paying too much attention to the cla.s.sics to the neglect of other studies. He returned to this subject again in Bleak House. Richard Carstone "could make Latin verses," but although his powers were naturally excellent he was a complete failure in life. He was not educated properly, notwithstanding his ability to make Latin verses.

Mr. Feeder is the perfect type of a mechanical crammer, "a sort of barrel organ with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation." What suggestiveness there is in the sentence "Mr. Feeder had his Virgil stop on, and was grinding that tune to four young gentlemen"!

"Bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber's young gentlemen," used to be considered too strong a criticism, but modern psychology fully sustains d.i.c.kens in his view. "Arrested development" is well understood now to result from too much grinding at any one subject or department of a subject, from the monotonous drill of the crammer, or from directing the child's attention too much to any one study.

The influence of uninteresting study on the spirits was clear to d.i.c.kens.

There is inspiration and physical advantage of a decided character in the successful study of an interesting subject--interesting to the child, of course--if the process of study includes the true self-activity of the child. There is blight, and nervous irritation, and "carking anxiety," if the child works under compulsion at the dead matter of study. No wonder the young gentlemen at Doctor Blimber's took leave of their spirits in three weeks, and pa.s.sed through the subsequent stages of deeper gloom described by d.i.c.kens. They had none of the joy of living interest in their study, none of the vital enthusiasm connected with independent thought, none of the health that comes from pleasant occupation, none of the happiness that is found in self-activity alone.

One of the best criticisms of wrong methods of teaching done by Mr. Feeder is the criticism of the method of teaching literature. "At the end of the first twelvemonth the boys had arrived at the conclusion, from which they never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and the lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world." There are high schools yet in which more attention is paid to the "words and grammar" than to the sacred and inspiring thought of the author.

A professor in one of the leading educational inst.i.tutions of America travelled in Scotland with his daughters. They were graduates of a high school. He observed with deep regret that they visited the mountains, and valleys, and rivers, and islands, and battlefields, and cathedrals of the land, that to him had been filled with sacred interests by the writings of Scott, and saw them all without emotion. One day he said to them: "Why are you not interested here? To me every foot of ground here is full of living memories. Scott describes it in The Lady of the Lake." One of them explained the reason. "Oh!" she said, "we're sick of Scott; we had enough of him in the high school."