|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: 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
|
