Dickens As an Educator Part 18

Bradley Headstone himself was a mechanical product of a mechanical system of uniformity that destroyed independence and individuality of character.

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage.

The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers--history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left--natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places--this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care.

Suppression of so much to make room for so much had given him a constrained manner over and above.

The most remarkable description of a system of training that totally ignored individuality and chipped and battered and moulded and squeezed all students into the same pattern or mould is the description of the normal school in which Mr. Gradgrind's teacher, Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild, was trained. "Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild and one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately _turned_ at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many piano legs."

Volumes could not make the sacrifice of individuality clearer than this sentence does.

At "the grinders' school boys were taught as parrots are."

Doctor Blimber was condemned because in his system "Nature was of no consequence at all; no matter what a boy was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other."

In Doctor Strong's school "we had plenty of liberty." The boys had also "n.o.ble games out of doors" in this model school of d.i.c.kens. Liberty and n.o.ble outdoor sports are the best agencies yet revealed to man for the development of full selfhood in harmony with the fundamental law of education, self-activity.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION.

In the preface to the first number of Household Words d.i.c.kens said that one of the objects he had in view in publishing the magazine was to aid in the development of the imagination of children.

From the time of Barnaby Rudge his unconscious recognition of the right of the child to have his imagination made freer and stronger can be felt in his writings. His conscious recognition of the absolute necessity of child freedom included the ideal of the culture of the imagination.

He reached his educational meridian in Hard Times, and the pedagogy of this book was devoted almost entirely to child freedom and the imagination; to revealing the fatal error of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy, which taught that fact storing was the true way to form a child's mind and character, entirely ignoring the fact that feeling and imagination are the strongest elements of intellectual power and clearness.

In Bleak House, which immediately preceded Hard Times, he gave a very able description of the effects of the neglect of the development of the imagination for several generations in the characteristics of the Smallweed family.

The Smallweeds had strengthened themselves in their practical character, 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 it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper limbs; but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of arithmetic, and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr.

Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single b.u.t.terfly.

This alone is a treatise of great suggestiveness on the need of the development of the imagination and the means by which it should be developed.

Hard Times was evidently intended to show the weakness of the Herbartian psychology. d.i.c.kens believed in the distinctive soul as the real selfhood of each child, and as the only true reality in his nature, the dominating influence in his life and character. He did not believe that knowledge formed the soul, but that the soul transformed knowledge. He did not believe that knowledge gave form, colour, and tone to the soul, but that the soul gave new form, colour, and tone to knowledge. He ridiculed the idea that the educator by using great care in the selection of his knowledge could produce a man of such a character as he desired; that ten pounds of yellow knowledge and ten pounds of blue knowledge judiciously mixed in a boy would certainly produce twenty pounds of green manhood.

He believed that in every child there is an element "defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is." He did not agree with the psychology of which Mr.

Gradgrind was the impersonation. Mr. Gradgrind believed that he could reduce human nature in all its complexities to statistics, and that "with his rule, and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table, he could weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to."

Mr. Gradgrind had established a school for the training of the children of c.o.ketown, and had engaged Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild to teach it. d.i.c.kens criticised the normal school training of his time in his description of Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild's preparation for the work of stimulating young life to larger, richer growth.

He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions.

Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography as general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way through her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the watersheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compa.s.s.

Ah! Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild, rather overdone. If he had only learned a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

d.i.c.kens criticised the lack of professional training, and the fact-storing process which subordinated feeling and imagination.

Mr. Gradgrind's school was to be opened. The government officer was present to examine it. Mr. Gradgrind made a short opening address:

"Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!"

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve.

The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.

The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.

"In this life we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts."

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

Most of the schoolrooms of the world are yet "plain, bare, monotonous vaults," although nearly fifty years after d.i.c.kens pointed out the need of artistic form and artistic decoration in schools we are beginning to awake to the idea that the architecture, the colouring, and the art on the walls and in the cabinets of schools may influence the characters of children more even than the teaching.

Mr. Gradgrind proceeded to ask a few questions of the pupils, who in this new school were to be known by numbers--so much more statistical and mathematical--and not by their names.

As he stood before the pupils, who were seated in rows on a gallery, "he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them 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."

In the last sentence d.i.c.kens reveals the true philosophy of sustaining and developing natural and therefore productive interest, and explains how, after destroying it, teachers try to galvanize it into spasmodic activity.

"Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger. "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?"

"Sissy Jupe, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and courtesying.

"Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't call yourself Sissy.

Call yourself Cecilia."

"It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another courtesy.

"Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?"

"He belongs to the horse riding, if you please, sir."

Mr. Gradgrind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

"We don't want to know anything about that here. You mustn't tell us about that here. Your father breaks horses, don't he?"

"If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir."

"You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then, describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)