The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 2 Education as a cause of melancholy.

Among these accidental causes of melancholy, education may justly claim the next place, for someone who escapes a bad nurse may be ruined by a bad upbringing. Jason Pratensis places education among the principal causes. Bad parents, stepmothers, tutors, masters and teachers, too rigorous or severe—or, at the other extreme, too lax or indulgent—often originate and promote this disease.

Parents and others entrusted with the care and supervision of children often go wrong by being too stern, always threatening, scolding, shouting, whipping or hitting. Their poor children become so disheartened and cowed that they never afterwards have any courage, a happy hour in their lives, or pleasure in anything. Great moderation is needed in such matters, which mean so much to the making or ruining of a child.

Some frighten their children with beggars, bogeymen and hobgoblins if they cry or are otherwise unruly; but they are much to blame for doing so. Often, says Lavater in On Ghosts, part 1, chapter 5, “through fear they fall into serious diseases and cry out at night in their sleep”: fear brings on many diseases, makes them cry out in their sleep and leaves them much the worse for it throughout their lives. These things should not be done at all, or only sparingly and for a good reason.

Tyrannical, impatient, hare-brained schoolmasters—“barren teachers”, as Fabius calls them, “whip-bearing Ajaxes”—are as bad in this respect as hangmen and executioners. They make many children endure a martyrdom throughout their schooldays. With poor food, if the children board in their houses, excessive severity and ill-treatment, they utterly distort their constitution of body and mind.

Always scolding, railing, frowning, lashing, setting tasks and keeping them in, they leave the children “broken in spirit”, often stupefied and weary of life: “through excessive severity they lose heart and despair”. They think no slavery in the world—as I once thought myself—equals that of a grammar-school pupil. “Children’s minds are tortured by their teachers’ foolishness,” says Erasmus. They tremble at the teacher’s voice, his looks, his entrance.

St Augustine, in the first book of his Confessions, chapter 4, calls this schooling “a fearful compulsion”, and elsewhere a martyrdom. He confesses how cruelly his mind was tortured in learning Greek: “I knew none of the words, and they pressed me violently, with savage terrors and punishments, to learn them.” I knew nothing, and was compelled daily with cruel terrors and punishment.

Beza complains similarly of a harsh schoolmaster in Paris whose continual thunder and threats once made him think of drowning himself. He would have done so had he not met an uncle on the way, who rescued him from that misery for the time by taking him into his house. Trincavelli, in book 1, consultation 16, had a patient nineteen years old, extremely melancholy “because of excessive study, and the threats of Tarvitius and his teacher”: because of too much study and his tutor’s threats.

Many masters are hard-hearted and bitter towards their servants, and so depress them, so torment them with frightening words and harsh treatment, that they become desperate and can never be brought back.