All things in these schools—buildings, teachers, and pupils—were according to pattern, and engendered in the light of the latest Gospel according to Monotony.
These brief descriptions contained volumes of protest against the dead uniformity of school architecture, and against the sacrifice of individuality in schools. There are no other buildings in which there should be more care taken to have truly artistic architecture than in schools, because the children are influenced so much by their environment. Correct taste may be formed more easily and more definitely by making the places in which children spend so much of their lives truly artistic than by studying the best authorities. The child’s spirits should be toned by the colouring of the walls of the schoolroom, and by the pictures, statues, and other artistic articles around them.
The phrase “Gospel according to Monotony” is one of the most effective phrases ever used to describe the destruction of individuality.
The Peecher-Headstone schools were described as one of several protests against separating little girls from little boys in schools.
Phœbe, the happy young woman, who had never been able to sit up since she had been dropped by her mother when she was in a fit, is one of the sweetest of the characters of Dickens. She lay on a couch as high as the window and enjoyed the view as she made lace. She taught a little school part of the day, and when Barbox Brothers was at Mugby Junction he heard the children singing in the school, and watched them trooping home happily till he became so interested in what was going on in the little cottage that he went in to investigate. He found a small but very clean room, with no one there but Phœbe lying on her couch. He asked her if she was learned in the new system of teaching, meaning the kindergarten system, because he had heard her children singing as he passed.
“No,” she said, “I am very fond of children, but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me, when they learn. I have only read and been told about the new system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. My school is a pleasure to me. I began it, when I was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company, don’t you see? I carry it on still, because it keeps children about me. I do it as love, not as work.”
What a beautiful school! What an ideal spirit for every true teacher! What a wise man Dickens was to reveal so much sweetness and trueness in the life of such a woman as Phœbe! When Phœbe had overcome her restrictions so triumphantly, surely every one who dares to teach should try to rise above personal infirmities, and treat children like the “merry robins that they are.”
The Holiday Romance, in which three young children write romances for the edification of their adult friends and relatives, to show how adult treatment impresses young children, is usually regarded as merely an exquisite piece of humour. In writing to Mr. Fields about the story Dickens said: “It made me laugh to that extent, that my people here thought I was out of my wits, until I gave it to them to read, when they did likewise.”
There is more philosophy than fun in these stories, however, and when carefully studied they should aid in the “education of the grown-up people”—not merely the “grown-ups” for whom they were intended, but all “grown-ups.” This is especially true of the last story, written by Miss Nettie Ashford, aged “half-past-six.”
The story is about Mrs. Lemon’s school and Mrs. Orange’s family.