Education Quote by Christopher Hitchens

There is a particular British cruelty Hitchens is putting under a microscope here: not the grand, melodramatic violence of authoritarianism, but the elegant, socially sanctioned sting of correction. He builds the scene out of tiny humiliations - a “small mistake in language or etiquette” - then inflates it into bodily punishment: “the flick of a lash.” The genius is the mismatch. A misplaced fork or mispronounced word is treated like a moral failing, and the punishment is administered with the clean hands of “good manners.” That’s the subtext: etiquette as a technology of power, a way to enforce class and belonging while pretending it’s just taste.

Hitchens, who made a career out of refusing deference, isn’t only reminiscing; he’s diagnosing a system that trains people to police themselves. “You could when I was younger” carries a double edge: nostalgia denied. If the country has softened, it’s not absolution, just a note on shifting norms. The emphasis on school is key because school is where hierarchy is naturalized. “There’s not much privacy” means shame becomes public property; your error is everyone’s entertainment and your lesson.

The repetition and hedging (“you know,” “and so on,” “yes, undoubtedly”) isn’t vagueness; it’s how the memory returns - a speaker circling the bruise. “Crushed” lands hard because it’s disproportionate, and that disproportion is the point: a culture that can devastate you without ever raising its voice.