KidLit Forum

I enjoyed Matilda very much because I really like the author too. Roald Dahl's books are very popular among children's books. I can tell that in all his books children always win.
Matilda's parents were bad kind of parents and even cruel, but Dahl is on the children's size and they always win against the bad people, so she did to.
I didnt't hope that the book will end in the way it did. It makes me think that , even if it is a happy ending, we can make it happens only in stories, but not in reality.It wouldn't be posible in our days, because it isn't so simple: you abandon your child in somebody's care for good and life goes on. It's not working that way!
I feel sad whwn I am thinking at the fact that such kind of families really exist and I feel sorry for their poor children, because they are neglected and they don't exist for their parents.

As small as she was, Matilda had the power to change her own fate, to turn the dice in her favour. This is what education actually does!

Matilda wouldn't have achieved so many things if her parents were close to her. Her parents are the "necessary evil" in her life. In the moments she was alone, Matilda taught herself how to read and write, she discovered all those amazing books that she read, and she became more attentive to other people's problems. It is said that if you teach somebody how to use a computer and you tell him about some of the things he could do with it, that person would only use the computer for those specific tasks only. But if you show him a coputer and tell nothing about its functions, the person would surely discover even more things about it than you could teach him.

We could say that "Matilda" is a story about how not to teach your students. Maybe in the past harsh words, loud voice and phisical correction worked in the educational system. Today this approach isn't admissible anymore. You don't educate a child/student by beating him/her or by repeating again and again how stupid and good for nothing he/she is. That would ruin the child's chances of ever being good at something.
"The Trnchbull" is the kind of teacher that uses brutality and phisical punishments in order to make students learn or remember what she taught them. She keeps telling them that they are a bunch of fools that do everything wrong: "You were wrong! The Trunchbull barked! In fact you strike me as the sort of poisonous little pockmark that will always be wrong! You sit wrong! You look wrong! You speak wrong! You are wrong all round!" As we could see the only thing she achieves is to make students abhor and reject her.
At the opposite pole we have Miss Honey. She praises children who are right and encourages those who are too shy or give wrong answers. She creates the perfect atmosphere for children to pay attention and learn.