Dickens As an Educator

What Dickens Taught About Schooling

James L. Hughes

• Publisher: Aeneas Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9785486613395
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

A Toronto schools inspector reads Dickens as pedagogy: Dotheboys Hall, Gradgrind's facts, the beaten boy and the loving one, and what the novels were arguing about how children should be taught. Hughes ran Toronto's schools for thirty-seven years and brought the kindergarten to Canada; his case is that Dickens changed the classroom more than any educationist. Fifty-nine plates from 1840 to 1915, among them interiors and portraits by Vilhelm Hammershøi and Félix Vallotton, picture the reading rooms, studies, and quiet domestic scenes in which Dickens was taught and discussed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Editor’s Preface.
• Author’s Preface.
• Chapter I. The Place of Dickens Among Educators.
• Chapter II. Infant Gardens.
• Chapter III. The Overthrow of Coercion.
• Chapter IV. The Doctrine of Child Depravity.
• Chapter V. Cramming.
• Chapter VI. Free Childhood.
• Chapter VII. Individuality.
• Chapter VIII. The Culture of the Imagination.
• Chapter IX. Sympathy with Childhood.
• Chapter X. Child Study and Child Nature.
• Chapter XI. Bad Training.
• Chapter XII. Good Training.
• Chapter XIII. Community.
• Chapter XIV. Nutrition as a Factor in Education.
• Chapter XV. Minor Schools.
• Chapter XVI. Miscellaneous Educational Principles.
• Chapter XVII. The Training of Poor, Neglected, and Defective Children.
• About the Author