“Who are you passing every day at your competitive excruciations? The fortunate candidates whose heads and livers you have turned upside down for life? Not you, you are really passing the crammers and coaches.”
And Jemmy Lirriper, in describing his teacher, said: “Oh, he was a Tartar! Keeping the boys up to the mark, holding examinations once a month, lecturing upon all sorts of subjects at all sorts of times, and knowing everything in the world out of a book.”
Dickens saw the evils of competitive examinations more clearly than many educators do two generations after him.
When educators in schools, colleges, and universities learn a better way to promote pupils, to classify men and women and to rank them at graduation, than by holding promotion and graduation examinations cramming will be of no use, and there shall be no more cramming.
Dickens was right as usual. The crammers and coaches are those who are tested by “competitive excruciations”; and how those who force through most students boast and strut and lord it over the less successful crammers and coaches on commencement days and other public occasions! What a misleading mockery examinations are as tests of power and character!
Few even of Dickens’s phrases contain such a condensation of fact and philosophy as the phrase “whose heads and livers you have turned upside down for life.” Few phrases deserve more careful consideration from educators.
Dickens makes the effect on the head still more startling by the description of Miss Wozenham’s brother in Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy. “Miss Wozenham out of her small income had to support a brother that had had the misfortune to soften his brain against the hard mathematics.”
In the same story he laughs at the practical results of language cramming usually done in the schools:
And the way in which Jemmy spoke his French was a real charm. It was often wanted of him, for whenever anybody spoke a syllable to me I says “Noncomprenny, you’re very kind but it’s no use—Now Jemmy!” and then Jemmy he fires away at ’em lovely, the only thing wanting in Jemmy’s French being as it appeared to me that he hardly ever understood a word of what they said to him, which made it scarcely of the use it might have been.
Dickens attempted to picture the feelings of a boy toward his teachers in the days when cramming was almost universally practised in the story of Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Redforth, aged nine. When the Latin master was captured, he was saved by Captain Boldheart from the punishment of death to which he was condemned by the crew of The Beauty. Captain Boldheart had been one of his pupils, and he said: “Without taking your life, I must yet forever deprive you of the power of spiting other boys. I shall turn you adrift in this boat. You will find in her two oars, a compass, a bottle of rum, a small cask of water, a piece of pork, a bag of biscuit, and my Latin grammar. Go! and spite the natives if you can find any.”