A Treatise on Parents and Children

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been / expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything / but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good / deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately / by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle / examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that / I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To / this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the / old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks / to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could / translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater / part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, / another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under / pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and / a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school. / Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty / stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as / obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the / blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And / if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy / at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.