Reading Dickens in the Wrong Classroom
I watched Sing (Mindenki) today, that quiet Hungarian masterpiece about an injustice at school. It made me think about the injustices in my own school — of which there were plenty — but one stands out more sharply than the rest: my English lessons. And perhaps I should first confess something that doesn’t feel self‑evident, even to me. As a teenager, I hated English lessons with a depth reserved for things that feel both unfair and pointless. They were the one place where the subject itself — a language I have always loved — felt like a punishment rather than a door opening onto the world. And there was a clear reason for this.
My teacher — consciously or not — divided the class into two camps: those who already spoke English at a comfortable B2 level, such as myself, and those who didn’t. She taught for us, the English‑speaking kids, not for them. She handed out extracts from Dickens for homework, then tested us on them as if this were a perfectly reasonable expectation. And I still cannot comprehend how she failed to see the obvious: that the children who didn’t yet know English came from modest households, families where money had to be spent on essentials — food, shoes, and yes, probably alcohol and cigarettes, though they hardly qualify as essentials — but certainly not on private language schools, summer schools, or after‑school tutoring.
It was an injustice so ordinary that it went almost unnoticed, except by the children who were punished by it. And I think that is why Sing unsettled me today: It reminded me how easily a classroom can become a place where knowledge is rewarded, but potential is ignored; where a teacher’s blind spot becomes a child’s lifelong disadvantage; where a language meant to open the world instead becomes a wall.
Now, I am aware that every teacher is part of a larger system, and that my teacher also had to follow a curriculum. But even within that framework, I remain convinced — back then as much as today — that she could have made a far greater effort to accommodate those who were not yet fluent in English. A curriculum sets the destination; it does not dictate the route. And she chose a route that only the already‑advantaged, such as myself, could walk without stumbling.
What still troubles me is how little imagination it would have required to make the lessons fairer. She could have differentiated tasks, offered simpler texts, created mixed‑ability groups, or simply acknowledged that not everyone had the privilege of private tutoring. None of this would have broken the curriculum. It would only have broken the illusion that all children begin from the same starting line. And I am not naïve — I do not believe that one class can eliminate inequality, nor am I even sure that inequality should be eliminated. After all, some people genuinely work harder than others, and effort does matter. But even with the tiniest, most skeptical part of myself, I cannot understand how a teacher would fail to grasp that the stark differences in English level were not a mystery of talent or temperament, but quite clearly the predictable consequence of economic and social inequality.
And perhaps that is the heart of the injustice: She taught as if the children who struggled were choosing to struggle. She taught as if the Dickens extract were a neutral assignment, not a quiet reminder of who had more exposure to the English language and who had less. My parents, for example, spent thousands of pounds and sent me — twice — to a highly exquisite summer college in England; I arrived in her classroom already carrying the kind of linguistic advantage that money quietly buys.
What sometimes makes me angry, even now, is that I love Dickens — he is one of my favourite authors — and feel a kind of sadness that she learned nothing from him. She read him without absorbing the moral clarity he offers so generously: his insistence on seeing children who are failed by the very institutions meant to protect them. She assigned Dickens as literature, but never understood him as a lesson. And so the writer who spent his life describing the vulnerable became, in her classroom, a tool for excluding them.
What stays with me, however, is not the anger but the clarity. I know now that a classroom is never just a room: It is a place where a person learns whether the world is open to them or closed. Mine taught me that injustice can be small, polite, and carried out with a smile — and that this makes it no less problematic. And the older I become, the more I feel the weight of that difference. Perhaps this is why Sing moved me so deeply today — because it reminded me that the smallest injustices in childhood echo for decades, shaping who we become.
