Dickens As an Educator Part 26

His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she would have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he might raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face once more. He thought how like her expression was then to what it had been when she looked round at the doctor--that night--and instinctively dropped her hand and turned away.

It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great disadvantage in her father's presence. It was not only a constraint upon the child's mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of her actions.

The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet and uncomplaining, was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart was sore when she was left alone again.

The same lesson was given to parents and teachers in Murdstone's treatment of Davy. The sensitive, shy boy was regarded as sullen, and treated "like a dog" in consequence. Oh, what bitterness it puts into a child's life to be misunderstood by its dearest friends! If there were no other reason for the co-operative study of children by parents and teachers, it would be a sufficient reason that they might be understood and appreciated. Many lives are made barren and wicked by the failure of parents and teachers to understand them.

It is so easy for children to get the impression that they are not liked by adults. When Walter started life in Mr. Dombey's great warehouse, his uncle, old Solomon Gills, with whom he lived, asked him on his return from work the first day:

"Has Mr. Dombey been there to-day?"

"Oh, yes! In and out all day."

"He didn't take any notice of you, I suppose?"

"Yes, he did. He walked up to my seat--I wish he wasn't so solemn and stiff, uncle--and said, 'Oh! you are the son of Mr. Gills, the ships'

instrument maker.' 'Nephew, sir,' I said. 'I said nephew, boy,' said he. But I could take my oath he said son, uncle."

"You're mistaken, I dare say. It's no matter."

"No, it's no matter, but he needn't have been so sharp, I thought.

There was no harm in it, though he did say son. Then he told me that you had spoken to him about me, and that he had found me employment in the house accordingly, and that I was expected to be attentive and punctual, and then he went away. I thought he didn't seem to like me much."

"You mean, I suppose," observed the instrument maker, "that you didn't seem to like him much."

"Well, uncle," returned the boy, laughing, "perhaps so; I never thought of that."

This short selection reveals the disrespect for childhood which leads adulthood to flatly contradict what a child says, whether he is making a statement of fact or of opinion. This is most inconsiderate, and naturally leads to a corresponding disrespect for adulthood on the part of the child. The selection clearly intimates that childhood would be more happy, and like adulthood better, if adulthood was not so "solemn and stiff."

Parents and teachers should learn from Solomon's philosophy that a child's feelings toward an adult partly determine his impressions regarding the att.i.tude of adulthood toward him.

The first thing necessary in training a child to be his real, best self is to win his affectionate regard and confidence. One has to be very true, very unconventional, and very joyous, to do this fully.

d.i.c.kens pitied the child because, even when he is understood, his wishes, plans, and decisions are not treated with respect. This is a gross injustice to the child's nature. As Pip so truly said: "It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."

Adulthood needs to learn no lesson more than that childhood lives a life of its own, that that life should not be tested by the scales and tape lines of adulthood, and that within its range of action its choice should be respected, and its opinions treated with reverent consideration.

Mrs. Lirriper said that when she used to read the Bible to Mrs. Edson, when that lady was dying, "though she took to all I read to her, I used to fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to his gentle compa.s.sion for us poor women, and to his young life, and to how his mother was proud of him, and treasured his sayings in her heart."

The divinity in any child will grow more rapidly if his mother "treasures his sayings in her heart." We need more reverence for the child.

d.i.c.kens tried to make parents regard the child as a sacred thing, which should always be the richest joy of his parents.

Speaking of Mrs. Darnay, in The Tale of Two Cities, he says:

The time pa.s.sed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

d.i.c.kens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been arrested.

Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall.... He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy.

Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.

David said the doctor's reliance on the boys "worked wonders." No wonder it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in him can reach.

CHAPTER XI.

BAD TRAINING.

In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other similar evils, d.i.c.kens's books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain many ill.u.s.trations of utterly wrong methods of training children.

The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the managers of inst.i.tutions is described in Oliver Twist. d.i.c.kens said that when Oliver was born he cried l.u.s.tily.

If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried the louder.

"Bow to the board," said b.u.mble, when he was brought before that august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.

"What's your name, boy?" said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.

Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite at his ease.

"Boy," said the gentleman in the high chair, "listen to me. You know you're an orphan, I suppose?"

"What's that, sir?" inquired poor Oliver.

"The boy is a fool--I thought he was," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

"Hush!" said the gentleman who had spoken first. "You know you've got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't you?"

"Yes, sir," replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

"What are you crying for?" inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What _could_ the boy be crying for?

"I hope you say your prayers every night," said another gentleman in a gruff voice, "and pray for the people who feed and take care of you--like a Christian."

"Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been _very_ like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of _him_.

The dreadful practices of first making children self-conscious and apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them "fools," or "stupid," or "dunces," are happily not so common now.

In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the way he had been educated.

From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.

d.i.c.kens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system which he described as