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.
Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these ori
It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.
Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.
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