A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that Sunday school serves as a punishment for children due to their parents' shortcomings.
H. L. Mencken's quote critiques the idea of Sunday schools by implying that rather than being a place of genuine learning and spirituality, they act as a form of punishment for children who bear the moral weight of their parents' failings. It reflects a skeptical view of religious education and questions its underlying motivations, suggesting that it might be more about addressing parental guilt than nurturing the innocence of children.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of religious education, this quote can highlight concerns about its purpose.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.
In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.
We recognize that real educational reform is essential if today's and tomorrow's children are to live in a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world.
We talk of globalization, and how much money is needed for the education of children in the world, their liberation and rehabilitation just $9 billion which is four days of military expense. Just four days. Nine billion dollars is nothing. But what Americans spent on ice cream just 20 percent of this. One fifth of what you spend on ice creams could bring the children out of the clutches of their masters and put them to school.
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.
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