Dickens, in his very able description of Doctor Blimber’s school, directs attention to nearly every phase of the evils of cramming. Toots is an illustration of the destruction of mental power by the “hard mathematics” and other subjects, when they are taught improperly. It is a serious result of an educational system, when the brightest young men “cease to have brains when they begin to have whiskers.”
Paul’s experience is used to show the terrible physical evils of cramming in any life, especially in the life of a delicate child. Paul was killed by his father and Doctor Blimber. He should have lived.
Cornelia’s aversion to live languages and her delight in “digging up the dead languages like a ghoul,” and the address presented to Doctor Blimber “which contained very little of the mother tongue, but fifteen quotations from the Latin and seven from the Greek,” were intended as a protest against paying too much attention to the classics to the neglect of other studies. He returned to this subject again in Bleak House. Richard Carstone “could make Latin verses,” but although his powers were naturally excellent he was a complete failure in life. He was not educated properly, notwithstanding his ability to make Latin verses.
Mr. Feeder is the perfect type of a mechanical crammer, “a sort of barrel organ with a little list of tunes at which he was continually working, over and over again, without any variation.” What suggestiveness there is in the sentence “Mr. Feeder had his Virgil stop on, and was grinding that tune to four young gentlemen”!
“Bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber’s young gentlemen,” used to be considered too strong a criticism, but modern psychology fully sustains Dickens in his view. “Arrested development” is well understood now to result from too much grinding at any one subject or department of a subject, from the monotonous drill of the crammer, or from directing the child’s attention too much to any one study.
The influence of uninteresting study on the spirits was clear to Dickens. There is inspiration and physical advantage of a decided character in the successful study of an interesting subject—interesting to the child, of course—if the process of study includes the true self-activity of the child. There is blight, and nervous irritation, and “carking anxiety,” if the child works under compulsion at the dead matter of study. No wonder the young gentlemen at Doctor Blimber’s took leave of their spirits in three weeks, and passed through the subsequent stages of deeper gloom described by Dickens. They had none of the joy of living interest in their study, none of the vital enthusiasm connected with independent thought, none of the health that comes from pleasant occupation, none of the happiness that is found in self-activity alone.
One of the best criticisms of wrong methods of teaching done by Mr. Feeder is the criticism of the method of teaching literature. “At the end of the first twelvemonth the boys had arrived at the conclusion, from which they never afterward departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and the lessons of the sages, were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the world.” There are high schools yet in which more attention is paid to the “words and grammar” than to the sacred and inspiring thought of the author.
A professor in one of the leading educational institutions of America travelled in Scotland with his daughters. They were graduates of a high school. He observed with deep regret that they visited the mountains, and valleys, and rivers, and islands, and battlefields, and cathedrals of the land, that to him had been filled with sacred interests by the writings of Scott, and saw them all without emotion. One day he said to them: “Why are you not interested here? To me every foot of ground here is full of living memories. Scott describes it in The Lady of the Lake.” One of them explained the reason. “Oh!” she said, “we’re sick of Scott; we had enough of him in the high school.”
There are Feeders yet who profane the temple of literature; who never connect the souls of their pupils with the soul life of the authors they study. Very few of the graduates of high schools have learned the high art of loving literature for its beauty and ennobling thought, fewer still have learned how to dig successfully in the rich mines of wealth that literature contains, and even a smaller number have learned to transmute the revelations of literature into character and new revelations in life or richer literature for the happiness and culture of coming generations. We may yet learn from Dickens.