a mere method of discipline

A wonderful quote (below, bolding done by me) from Rabindranath Tagore (and many more)  is up at Learn in Freedom site on this page documenting Nobel Prize winners who hated school.  A wealth of other resources is also available at the site.

[School] forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of the average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school. . . . I was not a creation of the schoolmaster,--the Government Board of Education was not consulted when I took birth in the world. But was that any reason why they should wreak vengeance upon me for this oversight of my creator? . . . So my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.

"My School," in Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: MacMillan and Co., 1921), pp. 114-115