An institution that functions predominately as a place for EDUCATION. At the eschaton, St. Augustine believed that the damned would suffer a pain infinitely worse (but no less embodied) than the pain they felt throughout their nasty, brutish, and short lives on earth. To vindicate this unorthodox opinion (it was not clear in fifth-century THEOLOGY that the body could endure such torment), the Bishop of Hippo developed a convincing retort: all have felt inklings of what awaits them at the gates of Hell from their time in school. Writing De Civitate Dei after his conversion to Christianity, St. Augustine was inclined to remember his secular education with acute disdain. But the history of literature is nothing if not a history of delinquents. Writers like Milton and Wordsworth have also been moved to despair about school. The word conjures up the image of a drafty and rectilinear classroom, at the front of which stands a teacher who is buttoned-up, pedantic, and (until recently) male. Perhaps there is a chalkboard behind him upon which he has diagrammed an English sentence by clause and phrase; perhaps there is nothing but a voice bellowing declensions of Latin nouns. Everywhere is the threat of punishment. That threat may be explicit or it may be implicit, but in any case it is credible, for otherwise the students would not be filed row by row and column by column. The antipathy for school is bound up with its taste for DISCIPLINE: to punish, and by punishing, to teach. That is how schools carry on with the instruction of artes, or skills. Grammar schools used to acquaint young aristocrats and sometimes their bourgeois peers with the lingua franca; trade schools reared the children of the poor into laborers, and often members of a union too; now professional schools test a college graduate for the capacity to master a swamping volume of technical material, and they offer a license and a network of colleagues to those who endure the ordeal (see PROFESSION). But to trust the earliest sources in the western canon is to see that it was not inevitable that school should be punitive. Indeed the Greeks understood school less as the means to an end than as the end itself. Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics that “happiness is thought to depend on leisure (scholē).” The Stagirite, unlike many who have reacted against him, believed that school was an enclave for reflection and repose, and that labor, such as levying taxes and waging war, involved tasks undertaken precisely so that more time could be available for contemplation (theōria). These two conceptions of school—Augustine’s, in which school is preparatory, and Aristotle’s, in which it is dilatory—pose a contradiction that any serious inquiry into the matter must resolve. A historical explanation for the opposition might point out that the intellectual foundations of school as an institution crumbled between the time of Aristotle and that of Augustine—schools originally meant for contemplation had become pragmatic (and punitively so) by the end of the Roman Empire. There may be another explanation, however—one suggesting that the contradiction is built into school itself. Often it has been observed that the children who hate school the most take the longest to get through it. This perversity evidently resonated with Augustine’s generation as well, for he wrote that “the process of learning with its attendant punishment is so painful that children not infrequently prefer to endure the punishments designed to compel them to learn, rather than to submit to the process of learning” (see IRONY). Indeed, as all teachers know, students will continue to endure such punishment ad infinitum, unless they fashion themselves into the pupils they were meant to be. In this way, students are caught in a double bind and suffer in either case. It thus becomes quite difficult to say what a rational student ought to do. The disquieting suggestion, in the end, is that school doesn’t explain Hell so much as Hell explains school: “In fact is there anyone who, faced with the choice between death and a second childhood,” Augustine asked, “would not shrink in dread from the latter prospect and elect to die?”