fore did not
give them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons or
not, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of which
was the real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn my
school lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the result
that I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns
as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder
of his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good
whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt; but I
escaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. And
this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced to
learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery
and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we
scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was
the phrase in my time--or let a master strike us with a cane and fall
back on our pride at being able to hear it physically (he not being
allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have been
taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on
the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable
routine. If my schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me
instead of painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying my
elders they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that I
was thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; that
I was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I was
a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing
could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than
allowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under such
conditions. But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commit
a crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys would
have threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to be
schoolfellows with the delinquent. I can remember only one case in which
such a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a boarder,
had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissed
by her. She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. The
truth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That was
why he was kept there against his will. That was why he was k