Often the small landowner did not have spare fields to lie fallow for a year-the ideal situation for soil enrichment.
"Frying Pan Farm"
Elizabeth Brown Pryor
It was therefore out of a full heart and an enriched mind that Dickens wrought the wonderful plots into which he wove the most advanced educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of joyousness on the child's development, the benefits of play, the influence of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the highest work of the teacher.
"Dickens As an Educator"
James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
Would you have robbed me-for no one's enrichment-only for the greater desolation of this world-of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble, and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?
"Dickens As an Educator"
James L. (James Laughlin) Hughes
