But please observe the limitation "at home." What private amateur
parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized
professional enterprise in large institutions established for the
purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand
over their children when they can afford it. They send their children
to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for
innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison.
But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for
instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and
the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they
could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you
cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you
are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or
interest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, and
are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a
prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains;
and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow
prisoners. 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 therefore 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 kept there
when his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit
both to his teachers and himself.
It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken,
and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door,
the school would not have been emptied, but filled. But so honest an
attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school much
more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without
imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being
tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and
starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor
schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as much
prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. They
could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would they
have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had
been heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: they
looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and most
impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted,
slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and
patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly,
nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a
pretext for punishing him.