Despite all the reverential mythification and mystification of Gurukul and studious, scholarly students, Plato’s academy and Socratic dialogue, literary representations of schools and teachers have often opted for satire, irony, humour and outright abrasive criticism. Many world renowned authors were not great school-goers ~ Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner.

Even Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk did not find schools adorable. Shakespeare was a school drop-out, as was Rabindranath Tagore, and Kalidas in all probability was not even home schooled. In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling elided the school education system completely, by mesmerizing readers with the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an alternative education paradigm. Dickens’ Mr. Creakle, Thackeray’s Betty Sharp flinging the dictionary out of the coach window as she leaves school, Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy hurling their scriptural books with disdain are all outstanding examples of the respective authors’ disenchantment with formal education. However the outstanding classic irony about profiteering institutionalized education and pretentious pompous pedagogues was of course the play

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The Refund first published in 1938, written by the Hungarian playwright Fritz Karinthy. Wasserkopf, a student in his thirties returns to school claiming a refund from the principal, as he alleges that his school education taught him nothing that could help him secure a job, nor did it equip him with skills that made facing adult life a smooth transition. Charles Dickens perhaps anticipated that in the 21st century, the cliched Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest would be replaced with the concept of survival of the greediest, without any embarrassment. We are truly in the era of post-eth ics. In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens observed about the education of a particular person named Mr. Jonas, that “the very first word he learnt to spell was ‘gain’ and the second (when he got into two syllables), ‘money’.” Also, in the novel, Hard Times a Dickensian character dismisses the entire discipline of humanities by asserting unequivocally, “NOW, what I want is,

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Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is........

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