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