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• Title: Starving Vs Cramming: Children's Education and Upbringing in Charles Dickens and Herbert Spencer (Notes) (Essay)
• Author : Dickens Quarterly
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 198 KB

Description

At the beginning of the twentieth century a Canadian inspector of schools, James L. Hughes, proclaimed Dickens "England's greatest educational reformer." According to Hughes, the novelist's views were widespread and influential because he chose to express them in the engaging language of fiction rather than in the dull language of treatises (1). There is a touch of exaggeration in Hughes's statement, as Philip Collins notes in Dickens and Education. Collins believes that Dickens was not so original and innovative: as a matter of fact "Many of the ideas or formulations he expresses were very much in the air" (211), and belonged to a debate on education current in British society at the time. One should remember that Herbert Spencer's Essays on Education were published in the 1850s, in well-known and prestigious magazines, such as the North British Review, then in book form in 1861. In the same decade Friedrich Frobel's innovative theories and practice about infant education were also widely publicized in Household Words. In 1855, for example, Dickens published Henry Morley's account of Frobel's kindergartens, a follow-up to a piece the year before in which Morley described how a fictional Doctor Quemaribus posted as a basic rule in his imaginary college the proposition that children should be considered "good," beings "so created by Divine Wisdom, as to be wonderfully teachable" (Morley 501). Hughes is correct, however, when he says that Dickens's fiction had a greater influence on public opinion than either theoretical works or articles in the press could have--witness the outcome of his denunciation of the Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickleby--also because, as Collins notes, his ideas came out of his "wide experience of visiting and working for various kinds of educational establishments"(3) (1). One of Dickens's campaigns exposed the "cramming" or "forcing" system in schools. Hard Times is, of course, the most outstanding and well-known example. The opening chapters show the absurdity of a pedagogy which filled children's brains with notions unconnected with real life: the names of the headmaster and of the teacher--respectively Gradgrind and M' Choakumchild--allude ironically to the ways and the results of their teaching. The whole of the story highlights the evil consequences of Gradgrind's "school of facts" and attacks the Utilitarian principles supporting it. This system was connected partly with the inheritance of the monitorial schools and partly with the misconception about the standards of knowledge required to pass exams and inspections. Matthew Arnold, who worked as a school inspector, states the reason more clearly in his "Report for 1852," where he writes that he has been struck "with the utter disproportion between the great amount of positive information and the low degree of mental culture and intelligence" in students at the end of their apprenticeship (26). There were still complaints of this kind in the 1860s: a reporter who had visited an elementary school for artisans commented ironically on "the full force of the cramming system which taxed the schoolboys' powers of memory to an unnatural extent"(Gosden 30). Another reporter remarked that schoolboys were underfed: "four ounces of sop bread for breakfast, four ounces of bread and butter for supper, and dinner in proportion is not enough." And his knowledge, he added, was from personal experience (Gosden 49). In an essay on "Children's Books," published in the Quarterly Review in 1844, Elizabeth Rigby uses the metaphor of feeding to point out "the stunted mental state" of pupils who "have been plied with a greater quantity of nourishment than the mind had strength or time to digest" (cited in Hunt 19).

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