Methodology That “Disabled” Learning in Charles Dickens’s and Ion Luca Caragiale’s Literary Works
Methodology That “Disabled” Learning in Charles Dickens’s and Ion Luca Caragiale’s Literary Works

Summary/Abstract: Both Charles Dickens and Ion Luca Caragiale mention the use of Johann Pestalozzi’s methods and principles in their fiction. Therefore, the literary representations of his methodology will be compared to the theoretical notions formulated by the Swiss pedagogue. For this purpose, the article will analyse the methodology used by teachers as described by Charles Dickens in Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby and Ion Luca Caragiale in Un pedagog de școală nouă (“A New School Pedagogue”). The focus will be on determining how efficiently Pestalozzi’s ideas were put into practice and to what extent the methods employed by teachers managed to enable students to learn. It is obvious that in order to draw attention to the drawbacks of the systems they were satirizing, the two authors are determined to teach by negative examples, by what their fictional characters do not properly do. It is for the enlightened pedagogues to show the way, not for these fictional characters who only hamper and disable learning.

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