Mill and Gradgrind
Mill and Gradgrind
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研磨机和研磨机
DOI：
10.2307/3044114
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发表时间：
1956
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
K. Fielding
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. Fielding
狄更斯的《最近的研究》比 F. R. Leavis 博士关于《伟大传统中的艰难时期》的分析笔记更有思想。人们可能在某些细节上存在不同意见，但它公正地指出了如果要理解这部小说，应该采取何种阅读方式。然而，他的一些言论在被认为有效之前肯定应该受到质疑。也许其中最重要的是这样的陈述：“托马斯·格雷德格林德……按照约翰·斯图尔特·密尔所记录的对他自己进行的实验来抚养他的孩子”（第228页）。埃德加·约翰逊教授已经更加有力地重申了这一点，他在他最近的传记中宣称，“格雷德格林德先生所认可的事实教育在精神上与约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒所遭受的教育是相同的”（第809页）。这对詹姆斯·米尔来说无疑是不公平的，而且他儿子在自传中所写的内容也是不合理的。就狄更斯讽刺格拉德格林德的“事实教育”有什么特殊目标而言，它不可能是詹姆斯·米尔私下采用的制度，而是在许多学校公开实行的制度。当然有证据表明，这种事实填鸭式的做法在学校中持续存在，甚至还受到一些督察的鼓励。但这是一个太宽泛的问题，无法在这里讨论。另一方面，米尔训练的一个要点是他不“充斥着纯粹的事实”。他坚持认为“我的……不是补习教育。我父亲从来不允许我学到的任何东西退化为纯粹的记忆练习”（世界经典编辑，第 26 页）。
N RECENT STUDY of Dickens is more thoughtful than Dr. F. R. Leavis' analytic note on Hard Times in The Great Tradition. Here and there one may disagree in detail, but it has justly marked out the way in which the novel should be read if it is to be understood. Yet some of his remarks should certainly be questioned before they pass current as valid. Perhaps the foremost of these is the statement that, "Thomas Gradgrind ... had brought up his children on the lines of the experiment recorded by John Stuart Mill as being carried out on himself" (p. 228). This has already been restated more forcibly by Professor Edgar Johnson, who declares in his recent biography that, "The factual education approved by Mr. Gradgrind is identical in spirit with that which was inflicted on John Stuart Mill" (p. 809). This is surely both unfair to James Mill and unjustified by what his son wrote in the Autobiography. As far as Dickens had any special target for his satire of Gradgrind's "factual education," it can hardly have been the system privately adopted by James Mill, but one that was publicly put into practice in many of the schools. There is certainly evidence that such factual cramming went on in schools, and even that it was encouraged by some of the inspectors. But this is too wide a question to pursue here. One of the cardinal points in Mill's training, on the other hand, was that he was not "crammed with mere fact." He insists that "mine ... was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory" (Worlds Classics edn., p. 26).