Education Quote by Roald Dahl

A child’s horror is doing double duty here: it’s testimony and indictment. Dahl’s choice of “allowed” is the quiet knife. Violence isn’t framed as a lapse or a scandal; it’s policy, normalized by an institution that can watch a boy get “quite literally” wounded and still call itself a place of learning. That “quite literally” matters because it drags the reader away from euphemism. This isn’t emotional hurt dressed up as metaphor. It’s bodies, bruises, blood. And the speaker is “appalled” not only by the pain but by the grown-up permission structure that makes it routine.

The phrase “masters and senior boys” sketches a hierarchy that reproduces itself. Adults delegate cruelty downward, and older students absorb authority as license. Dahl isn’t just remembering individual bullies; he’s noticing a machine: discipline as spectacle, humiliation as curriculum, the moral alibi of tradition. The subtext is a child learning that institutions can be impeccably orderly and still barbaric - that respectability can coexist with sadism.

Context sharpens the edge. Dahl grew up in the British boarding-school system between the wars, a culture famous for “character-building” and notorious for corporal punishment. Later, he turned childhood into literature that always seems to know where power hides: behind rules, uniforms, and the phrase “for your own good.” This line is a seed of his recurring theme: children aren’t naturally innocent; they’re naturally vulnerable, and adults often mistake that vulnerability for permission.