Sunday, April 16, 2023

A slaughterhouse called school

Writing about what school was like for his contemporaries in the early 20th century George Orwell writes in his novel ‘Coming Up for Air':

“I’ve been struck by the fact that they never really get over that frighful drilling they go through at public schools.

“Either it flattens them out to be half-wits or they spend the rest of  their lives kicking against it.”

That was England then but that’s how it was in Ireland also, and well into the 1970s.

And people dare call them the good old days.


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