Education Quote by A. C. Benson

Benson isn’t selling adolescent rebellion; he’s arguing for intellectual custody. The line turns on a quiet but loaded distinction: having opinions versus possessing them. “No opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one’s own” isn’t a claim that tradition is useless, but that borrowed convictions are morally weightless. In an education system built to mint gentlemen through imitation - of canon, of class manners, of proper feeling - Benson frames originality as a duty, not a luxury.

The subtext is confession disguised as pedagogy. “I suffered acutely” is doing more than tugging at sympathy; it’s an indictment of a culture that treated boys as vessels to be filled with approved sensibilities. Benson’s ache reads like the aftershock of a formation that prized correctness over inner authorship. He’s naming a specific cruelty: when your tastes are assigned, your emotions become performances. You learn to like what you’re supposed to like, to feel what earns approval, and you end up estranged from your own reactions.

Context matters: Benson wrote from inside the English public-school and Cambridge world, where education often meant social reproduction with a moral gloss. His insistence on “duty as a teacher” flips the usual hierarchy. The teacher’s job isn’t to furnish students with the right views, but to make room for the risky process of forming a self. The sentence works because it’s both admonition and apology - a late attempt to give his students what he never got: permission to be the author of their interior life.