Showing posts tagged learning
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When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying ‘Tom, I wonder’—upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light and said, ‘Louisa, never wonder!’


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.

Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
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Please, sir, he’s weeding the garden,” replied a small voice. “To be sure,” said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. “So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows ‘em. That’s our system,Nickleby; what do you think of it?
Nicholas Nickleby, chap. VIII
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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.
Hard Times, chap. VIII

A global Dickens appreciation, and a modest proposal

… will we celebrate Dickens on his next big anniversary? … [Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin] says schools today – despite foisting tomes like A Tale of Two Cities on unprepared teenagers – aren’t giving children the attention span to appreciate such complex novels. In the age of Twitter, who has the time or interest for 900-page excursions into 19th-century England?

Teaching Dickens With The New York Times

Here are some ideas and resources for celebrating a writer with a “fierce reportorial eye and restless, prodigal imagination” (Michiko Kakutani in 2010) who “could always extract wisdom, pathos, humor from the most unlikely materials, and…never failed to read the man underneath all the strange wrappages that habit, speech and association might have flung around him” (Dickens’s Times obituary in 1870).

Gradgrind's educational philosophy in the modern classroom

Sometimes education can’t be accurately measured by the “facts” of a test.

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NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
Mr Gradgrind, from Hard Times (1854), by Charles Dickens (via creeds)
(Reblogged from )
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There is no school in which a pupil gets on so fast, as that in which Kit became a scholar when he gave Barbara the kiss. He saw what Barbara meant now—he had his lesson by heart all at once—she was the book—there it was before him, as plain as print.
The Old Curiosity Shop, chap. 69
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In a school carried on by sheer cruelty, whether it is presided over by a dunce or not, there is not likely to be much learned. I believe our boys were, generally, as ignorant a set as any schoolboys in existence; they were too much troubled and knocked about to learn…
David Copperfield, chap. 7