CONTENTS.
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| [I.] | —The place of Dickens among educators | [1] |
| [II.] | —Infant gardens | [15] |
| [III.] | —The overthrow of coercion | [29] |
| [IV.] | —The doctrine of child depravity | [87] |
| [V.] | —Cramming | [96] |
| [VI.] | —Free childhood | [117] |
| [VII.] | —Individuality | [128] |
| [VIII.] | —The culture of the imagination | [136] |
| [IX.] | —Sympathy with childhood | [162] |
| [X.] | —Child study and child nature | [181] |
| [XI.] | —Bad training | [188] |
| [XII.] | —Good training | [218] |
| [XIII.] | —Community | [235] |
| [XIV.] | —Nutrition as a factor in education | [244] |
| [XV.] | —Minor schools | [258] |
| [XVI.] | —Miscellaneous educational principles | [285] |
| [XVII.] | —The training of poor, neglected, and defective children | [304] |
DICKENS AS AN EDUCATOR.
CHAPTER I.
THE PLACE OF DICKENS AMONG EDUCATORS.
Dickens was England’s greatest educational reformer. His views were not given to the world in the form of ordinary didactic treatises, but in the form of object lessons in the most entertaining of all stories. Millions have read his books, whereas but hundreds would have read them if he had written his ideals in the form of direct, systematic exposition. He is certainly not less an educator because his books have been widely read.
The highest form of teaching is the informal, the indirect, the incidental. The fact that his educational principles are revealed chiefly by the evolution of the characters in his novels and stories, instead of by the direct philosophic statements of scientific pedagogy or psychology, gives Dickens higher rank as an educator, not only because it gives him much wider influence, but because it makes his teaching more effective by arousing deep, strong feeling to give permanency and propulsive force to his great thoughts.