The same practice of charging up arrears of work is condemned in David Copperfield by associating it with the hateful Murdstones.
The crammer’s absolute indifference and contempt for any semblance of correlation in studies is revealed by Cornelia’s action in giving him a collection of books on his first morning before school with instructions to study them at the places she had marked for him. No wonder that “when poor Paul had spelled out number two he found he had no idea of number one; fragments whereof afterward obtruded themselves into number three, which sidled into number four, which grafted itself on to number two—so that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic hæc hoc was troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus, a bull, were open questions with him.”
Whenever words are given before thought, or as a substitute for thought, and without definite relationship to the thought already in the mind, they lie in the mind as unrelated, and therefore unavailable knowledge.
A boy in London had received considerable historical teaching, and his mind had made a certain kind of unity out of the confused mass. When asked at his final examination “What he knew about Cromwell,” he answered: “Cromwell interfered with the Irish, and he was put in prison. When he was in prison he wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress, and he afterward married Mrs. O’Shea.”
This was equalled by the other boy who wrote at an examination: “Wolsey was a famous general who fought in the Crimean War, and who, after being decapitated several times, said to Cromwell: ‘If I had served you as you have served me I would not have been deserted in my old age.’”
Paul’s studies were always dark and crooked to him till Florence bought copies of his books and studied them, and by patient sympathy made all that had been dark light, and all that had been crooked straight.
The habit of giving definitions of abstractions to children, and expecting the definitions alone to be comprehended by children, is held up to deserved ridicule in the explanation of the word “analysis” to Paul, when Cornelia proposed to read the analysis of his character.
“If my recollection serves me, the word analysis, as opposed to synthesis, is thus defined by Walker: ‘The resolution of an object, whether of the senses or of the intellect, into its first elements.’ As opposed to synthesis, you observe. Now you know what analysis is, Dombey.”
How perfectly simple and clear and expanding this would be to a child’s mind! Dickens says: “Dombey didn’t seem absolutely blinded by the light let in upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow.”
What loose habits of thought, and how much hypocrisy and mental vagueness are caused by using words instead of realities in the early teaching of children, and then asking them if they understand what we have been telling them! The “little bow” has usually a demoralizing effect.