Education Quote by Roald Dahl

Dahl opens with a sentence that sounds dutiful, almost neutral, then immediately makes it feel like a small-scale tribunal. “Prayers were held” uses the passive voice that institutions love: action without an agent, ritual without responsibility. It’s not “we prayed,” it’s that prayers happened to them, like weather or detention. The next line sharpens the scene into geometry: children “perched” (a word for birds, precarious and slightly ridiculous) in “rows” on “wooden benches,” while teachers occupy “armchairs” on a “platform.” Comfort and elevation are not accidents here; they’re the point.

The staging matters because Dahl is writing from inside the machinery that later fuels his fiction: a world where adults call control “moral instruction” and kids are props in a performance of propriety. Assembly Hall becomes an early lesson in hierarchy disguised as holiness. The teachers “facing us” flips the supposed direction of prayer. If prayer is meant to orient you toward the divine, Dahl shows it orienting you toward authority. God is offstage; the faculty are the audience, the judges, the ones who get to sit.

Contextually, it’s a snapshot of British boarding-school culture in the early 20th century, where religion functioned as civic training and discipline had theatrical flair. The subtext is classic Dahl: the world of grown-ups runs on ceremony and intimidation, and children learn to read power long before they learn to read scripture.