Dickens As an Educator Part 15

All processes that attempt to educate from without inward, instead of from within outward, are in the last a.n.a.lysis cram. The selfhood must be active in going out for the new knowledge. The child must himself be originative, directive, and executive in the learning process if cram is to be avoided completely. This is the only sure way to secure perfect apperception, and without apperception the new knowledge lies dormant, if not dead, and unrelated in the memory until it disappears, as did Bitherstone's. His declensions, according to d.i.c.kens, were not likely to last out his journey from England to India.

CHAPTER VI.

FREE CHILDHOOD.

Adulthood can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.

d.i.c.kens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.

Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be, suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they _are_ children, and lead children's lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance upon their s.e.x; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the privilege to die. G.o.d send that old nursery tales were true, and that gipsies stole such children by the score!

If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual freedom, and spiritual freedom.

In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympathize with a child who lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of the book in the opening chapter:

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity--two of the best qualities that Heaven gives them--and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.

Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather lived with but the one aim of making her happy.

In Martin Chuzzlewit--

Tom Pinch's sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps the wealthiest bra.s.s and copper founder's family known to mankind.

They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere outside, like the outside of a giant's castle, struck terror into vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.

When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she

was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and friends.

One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.

A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen "as if they were born grown up."

Paul's life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents.

Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother's death and her father's lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that "Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at school than go home."

Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in India to the respectable h.e.l.l conducted by that widely known and highly reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.

Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin's "correctional dungeon." What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate children could be stolen by the gipsies!

Mrs. Pipchin's theory taught "that it was wrong to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster."

When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, "if he would like them to make a man of him," the child replied:

"I had rather be a child."

One of d.i.c.kens's most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer's effort to qualify Tozer for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched necktie while he was a boy.

When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:

"What do you mean? Haven't you from a child----"

"A child!" said Edith, looking at her; "when was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman--artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men--before I knew myself or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned.

You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night."

"You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother."

"It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you," said Edith. "But my education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself."

Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:

"Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl--a younger girl than Florence--how different I might have been!"

Bleak House gives d.i.c.kens's most striking picture of the deterioration resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of generations.

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amus.e.m.e.nts, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family.

There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a series of generations the children had been, through heredity and training, made "little old men and women," who were never permitted to indulge in any childish plays, or to enjoy any stories, or in any way have a genuine childhood, so that they not only came to look like monkeys, but "like monkeys with something depressing on their minds"; and in which the only child for several generations had been Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, when she became weak in intellect and "fell (for the first time) into a childish state."

In The Haunted House the wretched child who came to Mr. Redlaw's room is described as "a baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child."

d.i.c.kens made his greatest plea for a free childhood in Hard Times. The whole of the educational part of the book condemns the training of Mr.

Gradgrind, although he was an earnest, high-minded gentleman, whose supreme purpose was to train his family in the best possible way. Indeed Mr. Gradgrind was so sure he was right in his views regarding child training that he founded a school to teach the children of c.o.ketown in accordance with what he believed to be correct principles.

Mr. Gradgrind is described as

a kind cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow children clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical subst.i.tute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They had been lectured at from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone they had been made to run to the lecture room. The first object with which they had an a.s.sociation or of which they had a remembrance was a large blackboard with a dry ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an ogre. Fact forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle, with heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learned the silly jingle, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are"; it had never known wonder on the subject, having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen and driven Charles's Wain like a locomotive engine driver. No little Gradgrind had ever a.s.sociated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb; it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

The effect of preventing all kinds of enjoyment for his children in their own home was that they naturally sought for enjoyment surrept.i.tiously in a way of which their father disapproved. But when a man disapproves of legitimate amus.e.m.e.nts in his family his condemnation of what is improper will have little weight with his children.

When Mr. Gradgrind was going home from the school examination he had to pa.s.s near the circus, and he was amazed to find his daughter Louisa and his son Thomas stealing a view of the performance.

Phenomenon almost incredible though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical Louisa peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:

"Louisa! Thomas!"