2) Carroll: Back to School

One of the things which Carroll makes fun of in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" is the system of education, as it existed in his time, and some remnants of which we can still observe nowadays.

The most obvious scene where education is being laughed at is the dialog between Alice and Mock Turtle, during which he remembers all the subjects he had at school, all of them sounding very similarly to the subjects taught in a Victorian school, like Reeling and Writhing, and different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. This distortion of names of the subjects indicates how much they were Greek to the children.

A lot of poems were usually learned by heart at school, sometimes without understanding what they were about. Carroll's mock poems probably show his opinion that fantasy is more important to children than a set of meaningless lines. Note, that whoever Alice recites a piece of poetry to, already knows the poem in question by heart. This can mean that the list of "classical" poems which were to be learned was the same in all schools and probably haven't been changed for generations.

The Queen of Hearts seems to represent a despotic teacher, who makes everybody walk in lines on the parade, supervises everything and randomly administers punishments. A cross-examination of Alice by the two queens in the end of "Through the Looking Glass" shows how difficult it was for a child to get through all the "dry" facts he was given at school and what a nonsense it seemed to be for him.

Carroll wrote his stories for children, and they have become very popular because they speak about things that are understandable and important for children, as school issues certainly are. This books are still loved by children, for they criticize what they think is illogical and unnecessary in their own fantasy worlds.

Works Cited:

1) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

2) I have looked up a lot about Victorian schools, this site gives the main idea very well