His career and mental development were exactly those of ninety-five per cent. of the boys who passed through the institution, except that he suffered more from fear. Fear was the directing force of the machinery. The High Master was a bearded man with a huge voice, with which he bullied his assistants. The senior members of the staff bullied the junior members, and, without being given any standard of right and wrong, the boys were punished, punished, punished: detentions, impositions, enforced drills, thrashings. The school was enormously successful, and everybody was immensely satisfied with it, though there was never a boy grown man who could look back with pleasure on the years spent in its toils. There were periodical attempts made to pump up the spirit of loyalty--_esprit de corps_--but they always flagged under the general listlessness. The boys understood that they attended day after day to be educated, a process which they regarded as extremely unpleasant, as indeed it was, and only tolerable in that its end was always in sight. The clever boys who were kept until they were nineteen and stuffed for Oxford and Cambridge and the professions were pitied rather than admired. There was nothing admirable in Oxford and Cambridge to those who knew nothing of them, save the second and third-class men who were so poor as to be glad of the miserable pittance granted them for the instruction of generations of Bennett Lawries and the sons of cab-drivers and millionaire mill-owners.
After his first term in the Fifth Form Mrs. Lawrie quarrelled with Bennett's aunt Louisa. Her subsidy was withdrawn, and Bennett left school with a mind untrained except in memory, and stored only with a curious litter of knowledge absolutely unrelated to the facts of his existence.
Education, like charity, should begin at home. Bennett had spent eleven years in being educated, but he had been taught nothing at all of the place in which he lived. He had not been told why it was, what it was, nor for what purpose it existed and grew and expanded. He knew nothing of its history except that it had once had a Latin name and had been occupied by the Romans, and that Oliver Cromwell had passed through or near it with his Roundheads. Everything that was told him was presented to him in such a desiccated form that his gorge rose at it and he could swallow it only with an effort. In a city of Puritans it seemed meet and right that education, like religion and life, should be made as unpleasant as possible.
