13 - Schoolroom practices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
While the man whose tutoring left such a profound mark on Charlotte Brontë's life and work taught in a foreign setting, her fiction gives her reader to understand that the best hope of succeeding as a teacher is to be allowed to teach in Britain. The reason is, of course, as the preceding chapter suggested, that the children of freeborn Britons are uncorrupted by the duplicity on which discipline in a Continental-European educational establishment necessarily rests. Falseness being the only way in which foreign young people can cope with the perpetual restraints and surveillance they are subjected to, whatever innate soundness and truthfulness they may have been born with is trained out of them. By contrast, English pupils possess finer feelings which it is the teacher's job to encourage and develop. A shy instructor like Caroline Helstone benefits personally from these feelings; fortunately for her, her Sunday-school girls like and respect her despite her low degree of self-assertiveness:
By some instinct they knew her weakness, and with natural politeness they respected it. Her knowledge commanded their esteem when she taught them; her gentleness attracted their regard; and because she was what they considered wise and good when on duty, they kindly overlooked her evident timidity when off: they did not take advantage of it. Peasant girls as they were, they had too much of her own English sensibility to be guilty of the coarse error [of exploiting her shyness].
(Shirley II.vi.312)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Brontës and Education , pp. 170 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007