Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

Children do not like to do wrong better than to do right. They like to do. They like to do the things they themselves plan to do. They like to do the things that are interesting to themselves. Their lack of wisdom leaves them at the mercy of their interests, and without guidance their constructiveness may turn to destructiveness. When it does so, it is because of the neglect of their adult guides to surround them with plenty of suitable material for construction or transformation adapted to their stage of development. With a sufficient variety of material for constructive plays the child will rarely exhibit destructive tendencies, and when he does so, the wisdom of his adult guide should find little trouble in changing his interest centre from the wrong to the right. The skilful trainer changes the interest centre without making the child conscious of adult interference.

It costs little to supply the child with sand and blocks, and soft clay, and colors, and colored paper, and blunt scissors and gum, and other similar materials—much less than is usually spent for toys; yet such materials would save parents from much worry, and help them to get rid of the wrong ideals, and they would preserve the natural tendency of children to constructiveness, and afford them an opportunity for the comfort and the development of real self-activity.

The child’s most dominant tendency is activity in using the material things of his environment to transform them into new forms or relationships in harmony with his own plans. This tendency is intended to accomplish four great purposes in the child’s development. It reveals the child’s own powers to himself, it develops his originality, it trains him to use his constructive powers, and it gives him the habit of transforming his environment to suit his own plans. If he is not supplied with suitable material to play with he will appropriate the material he finds most available. In this way, through the absolute neglect of his adult guides, he has acquired a bad reputation.

The instinct that leads the child to transform his material environment should lead to the conscious desire and determination to improve the physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions around him at maturity. It is therefore a very essential element in his training, and to check or neglect it may weaken and warp his character as much as it was intended to strengthen and direct it.

Thus the children have been coerced because men believed them to be depraved, and the coercion has developed the apparent depravity.

The darkest clouds have been lifted from the vision of adults and from the lives of the little ones by the breaking of the power of the doctrine of child depravity. The teacher especially has a more hopeful field opened to him. His great work of training is no longer restricted to putting blinders on the eyes of children to prevent their seeing evil, and bits in their mouths to keep them from going wrong. He believes that every child has an element of divinity, however small and enfeebled by heredity or encrusted by evil environment, and that his chief duty is to arouse this divinity (his selfhood or individuality) to consciousness and start it on its conscious growth toward the divine. The revelation of this new and grander ideal has led to all intelligent child study for the purpose of discovering what adulthood can do, and especially what childhood itself can do, in accomplishing its most perfect training for its highest destiny.

Dickens expressed his general faith in childhood in Mrs. Lirriper’s remark to the Major about Jemmy:

“Ah, Major,” I says, drying my eyes, “we needn’t have been afraid. We might have known it. Treachery don’t come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy—they do, thank God!”

He taught his philosophy of the origin of many of the evils that are attributed to child depravity in Nobody’s Story. “Nobody” means the workingman. He says to the Master:

“The evil consequences of imperfect instruction, the evil consequences of pernicious neglect, the evil consequences of unnatural restraint and the denial of humanizing enjoyments, will all come from us, and none of them will stop with us. They will spread far and wide. They always do; they always have done—just like the pestilence. I understand so much, I think, at last.”