The separation of the sexes was not approved.
The stupid blunder of treating all pupils alike, without regard to heredity, environment, or past experience, is aptly caricatured in giving the Adventures of Little Margery and the Experiences of Thomas Twopence to young women old in vice and to young male criminals in order to reform them.
Incidentally he disapproves of such literature for any children, and also of the autobiographies of “swaggering sinners.”
The error pointed out in Pip’s education of using the New Testament as a book from which pupils should be taught how to read is emphasized. “By dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to their turn, they were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history as if they had never seen or heard of it.”
He criticised severely the old custom of giving least attention to the choice of a teacher for the little ones. The old theory was: they can not learn much any way; anybody will do to teach them. “The inclined plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers of good intentions, whom nobody older would endure.”
The dreadful practice, still kept up in some heathen-producing Sunday schools, of having an “executioner’s assistant to keep order,” is severely condemned. “It was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth, their wretched faces.” The irritating influence of this operation on the suffering infants and the degrading effect on the executioner’s assistant himself are clearly indicated.
But the greatest cruelty was in having the infants talked at in a droning voice for an hour by the chief executioner in a voice that would sometimes deaden, sometimes irritate their nervous systems, and in language they could not comprehend, about subjects entirely foreign to their experiences.
The danger of spreading contagious diseases in such badly ventilated schools was shown. Dickens was a leader in the department of sanitation both in homes and in schools.
The schools taught by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peecher were
newly built, and there were so many like them all over the country, that one might have thought the whole were but one restless edifice with the locomotive gift of Aladdin’s palace.