In a school you have none of these advantages. With the
world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very
manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read
a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot
write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book
which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense
read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of
a book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods and
valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and
all sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with
streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city
delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some
human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled
pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you
move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that
even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler,
you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of
daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is
nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure
your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of
knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give
yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful
doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to
fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr
Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn
anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate
efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a
ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my own
schoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at
school? No; but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson's
schoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything to
beat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind--for
Johnson's great mind _was_ lamed--by learning his lessons. None of my
schoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to them
to say that their employers did not care a rap and there