Laudator Temporis Acti

William George Clarke (1821-1878), "General Education and Classical Studies," Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), pp. 281-308 (at 293):

When a missionary catches a young savage, he does not conceive his business to be to supply him with the food he loves, and leave him to rove about in nudity, picking off the white babies of the settlement with little poisoned arrows, but to train him, against his will, to a civilized acquiescence in beef and broad-cloth, buttons and good behaviour.

An English boy is a young savage in his way, and a judicious application of force is not only not useless, but even necessary, not only not cruelty, but kindness. By force I do not mean violence; I would have them ruled by authority, not the birch. The first lesson, the most important lesson a boy has to learn, is the duty of submission to restraint, of application to a distasteful task, whose meaning and value he is only to comprehend hereafter. It would be fatal to mental discipline and powers of application to begin by inculcating the notion that each boy need only learn what he liked.

Id. (at 294):

[I]t is no valid objection to any subject to affirm that it is dry and distasteful, but on the contrary, a strong recommendation.