Dickens on Education: Let Charles Dickens Save Us From Edu-Doom

Last updated on: February 26, 2017 at 5:33 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Dickens on Education: Let Charles Dickens Save Us From Edu-Doom 2017-02-26T17:33:57-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Charles Dickens might save us from producing a Christian church ripe for destruction by zealots and revolutionaries. Before we get to how that is possible from a fellow long dead, and of questionable personal orthodoxy, understand what he did in his time.

France wallowed in Revolution and Russia was consumed by it. England, Merrie Olde England, escaped, but barely. Charles Dickens did not save England from the Red Terror by himself, but he did more than his share. He was one of the great educators of the Victorian age taking the English imagination and making change possible without turning change into the gospel.

Dickens loved the best of what was, and hoped to save it, but knew that there were deep cultural problems: chief amongst them was education and the turn it was taking. He took on brutality in education in Nicholas Nickelby and nobody could pretend such schools did not exist or were acceptable. Dickens pointed that leaving the streets to educate the poor was a source of crime in Oliver Twist.

I have never seen a Christian college that wanted to be as brutal and useless as Dotheboys Hall, at least on purpose, but sadly, there is a deeper problem that tempts us all. We could stick to “facts” and teaching definitions. We could ignore art, culture, human things and only ask for “science” as if “science” were simply facts and not art as well.

After all, the scientist who prefers the elegant math of one theory over the kludgy math of another has the soul of a poet and not (to paraphrase) Darwin, the mind of a fact grinding machine.

You can put facts in an online test. You cannot put discipleship. You can put definitions on a Scantron, but not a discussion of the text. When I prepare a lecture on Dickens, I know what I know, but not what the students will ask. Education is full of wonder.

Dickens dared to tell the truth. A school that homogenizes curriculum, makes discipleship optional, is worse than sending your kids to the circus. He presents the victims of a “fact based” school where credentials will be earned to become cogs in the industrial machine as starving for joy. Education that ever makes a decision based on what the software can do or is for profit is soul crushing. You cannot be pastored by a televangelist and you should not be educated by one.

The fact based, content controlled school or college strips the joy out of education for a march through the “content.” This is the school that stresses the syllabus over the class experience!

Dickens knew the result of such an education:

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them, analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

DICKENS, CHARLES (2011-03-12). Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated) (Kindle Locations 164799-164802). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

We must not do this. The result is ignorance and Dickens knew where that ended:

“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit, are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

The bell struck twelve.

Doom.

Doom is the result of education based on facts and credentials.

God help us.

————————

Thoughts as I prepared for a lecture at The Saint Constantine School and The College at the Saint Constantine School

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