Dickens As an Educator Part 20

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division settle everything somehow, and never wonder. "Bring to me," says Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild, "yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder."

Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild deliberately planned, as a result of a false psychology, to destroy all foolish dreamings and imaginings and wonderings by the children. This same wonder power is the mightiest stimulus to mental and spiritual effort, the source of all true interest, man's leader in his work of productive investigation.

Wonder power should increase throughout the life of the child.

Unfortunately, the Gradgrind philosophy is practised by many educators.

The child's natural wonder power is dwarfed, and an unnatural interest is subst.i.tuted for it. Teachers kill the natural interest, and then try to galvanize its dead body into temporary activity. The child who was made a wonderer and a problem finder by G.o.d is made a problem solver by teachers.

His dreamings and fancies have been stopped, and he has been stored with facts and made "practical."

Mr. Gradgrind was much exercised by the fact that the people of c.o.ketown did not read the scientific and mathematical books in the library so much as poetry and fiction. It was a melancholy fact that after working for fifteen hours a day "they sat down to read mere fables about men and women more or less like themselves, and about children more or less like their own. They took De Foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be, on the whole, more comforted by Goldsmith than by c.o.c.ker." This was very discouraging to Mr. Gradgrind.

One night Louisa and Tom were sitting alone conversing about themselves and the way they were being trained by their father. In the course of their conversation Tom said:

"I am sick of my life, Loo; I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody except you. As to me, I am a donkey, that's what I am. I am as obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like to kick like one."

"Not me, I hope, Tom."

"No, Loo, I wouldn't hurt _you_. I made an exception of you at first.

I don't know what this--jolly old--jaundiced jail"--Tom had paused to find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of this one--"would be without you."

"Tom," said his sister, after silently watching the sparks a while, "as I get older, and nearly growing up, I often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can't reconcile you to home better than I am able to do. I don't know what other girls know.

I can't play to you, or sing to you. I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired."

"Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a mule too, which you're not. If father was determined to make me either a prig or a mule, and I am not a prig, why, it stands to reason, I must be a mule. And so I am."

"I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about," said Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, "and all the Figures, and all the people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together."

Louisa sat looking at the fire so long that Tom asked, "Have you gone to sleep, Loo?"

"No, Tom, I am looking at the fire."

"What do you see in it?"

"I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly, but since I have been looking at it I have been wondering about you and me, grown up."

"Wondering again?" said Tom.

"I have such unmanageable thoughts," returned his sister, "that they _will_ wonder."

"Then I beg of you, Louisa," said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, "to do nothing of that description, for goodness' sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she was not to do it."

Louisa denied Tom's partic.i.p.ation in the offence; but her mother stopped her with the conclusive answer, "Louisa, don't tell me, in my state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically impossible that you could have done it."

"I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it."

"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. "Nonsense!

Don't stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you know very well that if it was ever to reach your father's ears I should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes!"

When a boy hates home, and a girl in her teens is rejoicing at the prospect of a short life, there has been some serious blunder in their training.

When her father was proposing to her that she should marry old Bounderby, Louisa said:

"What do _I_ know, father, of tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature in which such light things might have been nourished? What escape have I had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be grasped?" As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.

After her marriage to Bounderby Louisa rarely came home, and d.i.c.kens gives in detail a sequence of thought that pa.s.sed through her mind on her approach to the old home after a long absence. None of the true feelings were stirred in her heart.

The dreams of childhood--its airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond, so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great charity in the heart, suffering little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and not worldly-wise--what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon reason through the tender light of fancy, she had seen it a beneficent G.o.d, deferring to G.o.ds as great as itself; not a grim idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything but so many calculated tons of leverage--what had she to do with these?

This quotation shows how clearly d.i.c.kens saw the relations.h.i.+p between the imagination and the reason. Her imagination had been dwarfed and perverted; and her power to feel, and to think, and to appreciate beauty, and to love, and to see G.o.d and understand him, was dwarfed and perverted as a consequence.

Her poor mother, who had always felt that there was something wrong with her husband's training, but dared not oppose him, and fully supported him for the sake of peace which never really came, was worn out, and had almost become a mental wreck. Her mind was struggling with the one great question. She tried and tried vainly to find what the great defect of her husband's system was, but she was very sure it had a great weakness somewhere. She tried to explain the matter to Louisa when she came to see her.

"You learned a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds, from morning to night. If there is any ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name."

"I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on." This, to keep her from floating away.

"But there's something--not an ology at all--that your father has missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now. But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to find out, for G.o.d's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen."

When Louisa, unable to resist alone the temptation to go with Mr.

Harthouse, fled to her father and told him in such earnest words that she cursed the hour she had been born to submit to his training, she said:

"I don't reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but oh! if you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!"

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.

"Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I feared while I strove against it--as it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast sensibilities, affections, weakness capable of being cherished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is--would you have given me to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?"

He said, "No, no, my poor child."

"Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me--for no one's enrichment--only for the greater desolation of this world--of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?"

"Oh, no, no! No, Louisa."

"Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat in regard to them, I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say. With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute, I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.

"In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest."

When she had finished the story of her acquaintance with Mr. Harthouse and his influence over her, she said: "All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this.

Save me by some other means."

d.i.c.kens pictured Mr. Gradgrind as a good, earnest man, who desired to do only good for his family.

In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compa.s.ses, he had meant to do great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

A careful study of what Louisa said to her father will show that d.i.c.kens had made a profound study of Froebel's philosophy of the feelings and the imagination which is now the dominating theory of psychology, and that he clearly understood what Wordsworth meant when he wrote:

"Whose heart the holy forms of young imagination had kept pure."

Sissy Jupe failed utterly to satisfy Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild at school. She could not remember facts and dates. She could not be crammed successfully, and she had a very dense head for figures. "She actually burst into tears when required (by the mental process) to name immediately the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen pence halfpenny," so Mr.

Gradgrind told her she would have to leave school.