CRAMMING.

Although Dickens paid much more attention in his writings to the methods of training than to the methods of teaching, he studied the methods of teaching sufficiently to recognise some of their gravest defects. Dombey and Son is unquestionably the greatest book ever written to expose the evils of cramming. Doctor Blimber, Cornelia, and Mr. Feeder, when closely studied, represent in the varied phases of their work all the worst forms of cramming.

Paul’s reply is one of the most touchingly beautiful of even Dickens’s wonderful expressions—wonderful in their exquisite simplicity and their profound philosophy. When this book was written Dickens was beginning to get the conception of the great truth, which he illustrated at length in Hard Times and other works, that it is a crime against a child to rob it of its childhood.

When Doctor Blimber in his cold, formal manner asked Paul “why he preferred to be a child,” the little fellow was unable to answer, and as they stared at him, he at length put his hand on the neck of Florence and burst into tears.

On leaving, Mr. Dombey said to Paul:

After his father and Florence had left him the doctor said to Cornelia:

After being shown through the dormitories, Cornelia told him dinner would be ready in fifteen minutes, and that in the meantime he had better go into the schoolroom among his “friends.”

At dinner no boy was allowed to speak; every one was compelled to listen to the tedious discourse of Doctor Blimber on the customs of the Romans. The cramming of youth was continued with great dignity even during meals. One boy, Johnson, was unfortunate enough to choke himself by too suddenly swallowing his water in order to catch Doctor Blimber’s eye when he began an account of the dinners of Vitellius; and to punish him for his breach of manners, Doctor Blimber said before the boys were dismissed from the table:

It used to be a common practice to cultivate a loving reverence for God by using the Bible as a means of punishment. This was in harmony with the old educational and the old theological ideal of punishment, as the supreme means available for guiding children properly. It was considered a perfectly appropriate use of the best book to use it for this best of purposes.

As Paul was going downstairs in the morning Miss Blimber called him into her room, and, pointing to a pile of new books on her table, said:

So Paul’s cramming went on day by day. The delicate little boy, who should not have been sent to school at all, was forced to memorize confused masses of words that had no meaning to him, but he learned to repeat the words, and so got the credit of doing well, and because he learned easily was driven harder and harder. The more easily he carried his burden the higher it was piled on his back.

Dickens did not wish to lay all the blame for the stupid process of cramming on the teachers. He properly revealed to parents that they were even more to blame than the teachers, because they got what they demanded. Doctor Blimber summed up the whole philosophy of the adulthood of his time in regard to a child’s education when he said to his daughter, “Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!”

The standard of knowledge cramming fixed by parents and school boards is changing very slowly. Even yet a teacher’s success is measured and his chances of re-engagement decided in most places by the answer to the question, “How does he bring the children on?”

When asked by Doctor Blimber what he wished his little sickly son to learn, Mr. Dombey answered, “Oh, everything.”

When Paul learned easily, his father pressed for more studies; and because Briggs was dull, his father demanded that he be driven harder at school, and made the poor boy’s life miserable at home by tedious lessons during the holidays.

The uncle who made Tozer wretched by asking him unexpected questions on all occasions is a type of an ogre who sometimes blights the lives of children still.

Dickens had a beautiful sympathy with childhood in its sufferings not merely on account of deliberate cruelty and neglect, but because of the burdens placed upon it by adults who, with the best intentions, robbed it of its natural rights of joyousness and freedom.

Whenever Doctor Blimber was informed that Paul was “old-fashioned” or “peculiar,” he said, as he had said when Paul first came, that study would do much; and he also said, as he said on that occasion, “Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring him on!”

Just before the close of the term Paul fainted and had to be carried to his room, and after an examination the physician advised Doctor Blimber to “release the young gentleman from his books just now, the vacation being so near at hand.”

It was so very considerate to release him from study, when he was utterly unable to study any longer.

At the close of the school party when he was leaving—

Paul never returned to school. His life was sacrificed to his father’s desire to have him “learn everything.”

In a brief look at the results of Doctor Blimber’s teaching, Dickens tersely outlines three common results of cramming:

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.Tozer became an antique pedant, learned but not educated.

Briggs grew to be dull and heavy-witted, and had his “knowledge so tightly packed that he couldn’t get at anything he wanted.”

Bitherstone was one of the few fortunate fellows who are gifted with natural power to pass through the cramming system without being affected seriously in any way. They get little, if any, good, and they speedily forget the wrongs inflicted upon them and the learning with which their teachers attempted to cram them.

Briggs showed the evil effects of cramming in the destruction of individuality. “His fruit had nothing of its original flavour remaining.” This is one of the general charges made against Doctor Blimber’s forcing establishment, or hothouse. “Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern somehow or other.” The destruction of selfhood was the great evil of the old system of teaching.

Another important criticism made by Dickens of the hothouse system is worthy of special attention by educators. He recognised the evil effects of giving any study or work to children, that is naturally adapted to a later stage of their development. The development of children is always arrested when the work of a higher stage is forced into a lower stage of their growth. The true evolution of the child consists in a growth through a series of progressive and interdependent stages. This was not recognised in the educational system Dickens desired to improve. It is not yet recognised to a very large extent in practice. “All the boys blew before their time,” in Doctor Blimber’s school. “The doctor, in some partial confusion of ideas, regarded the young gentlemen as if they were all doctors, and were born grown up.”

Dickens was so careful to make his names and terms express volumes of meaning that he probably meant the phrase “mathematical gooseberries” to be especially significant. The fact that they were grown on “mere sprouts of bushes,” and as a consequence were “very sour ones, too,” reveals the philosophy since made so clear by Doctor Harris, that early “drilling” in arithmetic has been one of the prolific causes of arrested development in children. The appeal against the common practice of growing “every description of Greek and Latin vegetable” from “dry twigs of boys” was comprehensive and timely. They were not merely twigs, but dry twigs in whom the sap had not begun to circulate freely. No expressions, no volumes, could state the evil of untimely cramming more clearly than this group of phrases used by Dickens in describing Doctor Blimber’s school.

“The frostiest circumstances” is another of the thought-laden phrases, which was evidently intended to warn teachers against the mistake of trying to produce any intellectual fruit at untimely periods of the child’s development. “Wintry growth” means unseasonable or untimely development.

The condemnation of the feeling shown by Paul in parting from Florence, and the Doctor’s cold-blooded observation, “Never mind; we shall substitute new cares and new impressions, Mr. Dombey, very shortly,” were intended to show how utterly the knowledge cramming ideal had prevented the recognition of the fundamental fact that feeling is the basis and the battery power of intellectual force and energy. The same principle is taught by Cornelia’s shock at Paul’s affection for old Glubb, and her father’s summary settlement of the case, when he realized that the little child was intensely affectionate and sympathetic. “Ha!” said the Doctor, shaking his head, “this—is—bad, but study will do much.”

Dickens deals in a most thorough manner with the absolute wickedness of neglecting, or attempting to smother feeling in the training and education of children in Hard Times. He undoubtedly received his clear conceptions relating to the intellectual value of feeling from Froebel’s writings.

The bad effects of cramming on the physical constitution of children are pointed out in “the convulsive grasping of their foreheads” by the two boys engaged in solving mathematical problems. Nervous exhaustion is here plainly indicated. They were “very feverish,” too, and poor Briggs was in even a worse condition, for “he was in a state of stupefaction and was flabby and quite cold.” Both Briggs and Tozer frightened Paul the first night he tried to sleep in their room by talking Latin and Greek in their dreams. Paul thought they were swearing. Education should never interfere with a child’s sleep, either with its soundness or its duration. Even the boys told Paul on the first day of his school life that he would need a good constitution to withstand the strain at Doctor Blimber’s.

The exhaustive and exasperating practice of piling up arrears of work, so naturally connected with cramming—in fact, so essential a part of the unnatural process—comes in for its share of condemnation, too. One of the boys, “whose face was like a dirty window, from much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines.” The friends of Briggs were constantly in terror “lest they should find his hat floating on a pond and an unfinished exercise on the bank.”

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.

It is a mere farce to call the committing to memory of definitions “education.”

Whatever the subjects, it is a dwarfing process, whether the definitions are memorized at home or at school, silently, by oral repetition, or by singing them. All definition learning as the origin of thought is certain to destroy interest and arrest development and lead to inaccuracy of thought. Miss Le Row’s collection of blunders made by children could never have been made if the children had been taught properly.

Such mistakes as “The body is mostly composed of water, and about one half of avaricious tissue” or “Parasite, a kind of umbrella,” or “Emphasis, putting more distress on one word than on another,” should suggest to teachers the absurdity of committing definitions to memory. It is one of the weakest forms of cramming, and is most ridiculous and least useful when the memorizing is done by simultaneous oral repetition.

Hard Times exposes the evils of cramming in the teaching practised in the normal school in which Mr. M’Choakumchild was trained, and in the definition repetition as given by Bitzer, and so highly praised by Mr. Gradgrind:

“Bitzer, your definition of a horse:”

“Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”