Synopsis
This book has two purposes: to prove that Charles Dickens was the great apostle of the "new education" to the English speaking world, and to being into connected form, under appropriate headings, the educational principles of one of the world's greatest educators, and one of its two most sympathetic friends of childhood.
Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most comprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He was one of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and his revelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritual destitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest which ultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.
He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In the twenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of his army of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly every form of bad training resulting form ignorance, selfishness, in difference, unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No other writer has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment, and ill usage of childhood.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was a British writer known for his tales of Victorian life and times and England's greatest educational reformer.
In 1903 when Dickens as an Educator was originally published, James L. Hughes was the Inspector of Schools, Toronto.