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BY
JAMES L. HUGHES
INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, TORONTO
AUTHOR OF FROEBEL’S EDUCATIONAL LAWS
MISTAKES IN TEACHING, ETC.
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1900,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Electrotyped and Printed
at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.
The following pages are sufficient to establish the claim of Mr. Hughesfor Dickens as an educational reformer—the greatest that England hasproduced. It will be admitted that he has done more than any one else tosecure for the child a considerate treatment of his tender age. “It is acrime against a child to rob it of its childhood.” This principle wasannounced by Dickens, and it has come to be generally recognised andadopted. Gradually it is changing the methods of primary instruction andbringing into vogue a milder form of discipline and a more stimulativeteaching—arousing the child’s self-activity instead of repressing it.
The child is born with animal instincts and tendencies, it is true, but hehas all the possibilities of human nature. The latter can be developedbest by a treatment which takes for granted the child’s preference toadopt what is good rather than what is bad in social customs and usages.
The child, it is true, is uneven in his proclivities, having some bad onesand some good ones. The true pedagogy uses the good inclinations as alever by which to correct bad ones. The teacher recognises what is good inthe child’s disposition and endeavours to build on it a[Pg vi] self-respectwhich may at all times be invoked against temptations to bad conduct.Child depravity sometimes exists, but it can generally be traced toinjudicious methods of education in the family, the school, or thecommunity. Dickens has laid so much emphasis on defects of method in thesethree directions that he has made the generation in which he lived and thenext succeeding one sensitively conscious of them. He has even caricaturedthem with such vehemence of style as to make our ideals so vivid that wesee at once any wrong tendency in its very beginning.
Walter Scott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so hasShakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry andmade them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he hasattacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family inthe boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninterestinginstruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know shouldbe made interesting to the child, and the teacher is t