Why George Orwell Hates Crossgates Essay, Research Paper

The Crossgates School was an expensive and prominent preparatory school. Those who attended were bound to academic achievement, yet not all of its students were happy with all of the wealth that Crossgates had to offer. George Orwell, for example, mostly lived an unhappy life while staying at Crossgates. As a child, he had to live with poor facilities, the prejudice, and the use of shame towards the poor. The attitude of Crossgates towards education was not humane and sensible, which impacted the lives of many children including Orwell s. One of the factors to Orwell s unhappiness was the poor facilities. Orwell thought that by attending an expensive school, the standard of comfort would be higher than his home, but he was mistaken. At Crossgates, health and cleanliness were neglected. The children led an overcrowded, underfed, and underwashed life. One of Orwell s disturbing memories dealt with the quality of the food. Orwell reminisces of how he ate out of pewter bowls that had overhanging rims, which had accumulations of sour porridge, and the porridge he ate contained lumps, hairs, and unexplainable black things. It was never safe for someone to start eating the porridge without investigating it first. These conditions are not suitable for a child to live experience, and it is not surprising why this would cause unhappiness. Orwell was poor and he paid for it at Crossgates. He suffered prejudice acts that the rich boys never had to endure. Such acts included caning, being picked on, and not having the privilege to possess certain toys because of economic standings. A sad memory of prejudice that Orwell faced dealt with the distribution of cake on a boy s birthday. On a boy s birthday, a cake was provided to the entire school, but this didn t apply on the birthdays of the poor kids. Year after year, Orwell would miserably hope that a cake would appear for him on his birthday. Once or twice, he pretended to his companions that he was going to have a cake, but it never came leaving Orwell in a poor state of mind. He felt neglected and unpopular, and as a child, this can be tough to go through, especially when your benefactors just add to the problem. At Crossgates, the schoolmasters felt it was necessary to publicize failures of the poor boys. Orwell had been put to shame in one instance when a headmaster publicized his disgusting offense of bedwetting to a visitor of the school. This occasion brought a great deal of humiliation to Orwell. To this day, he can recall his body swooning with shame as he stood before the women. Not only was the headmaster wrong to publicize his offense, but the headmaster also led Orwell to think that he was wrong in his offense. He was punished for his offense, which was uncontrollable. Was Orwell unhappy at Crossgates? I think that the recollection of his memories lead us to say yes. The reality of these hardships that he had to endure is unbearable. The prejudice and the caning and the shame and everything else that only the poor endured are all tragic, not to mention the poor facilities that the kids used. I feel terrible for the kids like Orwell who had to go through this on a daily basis because, for me, it s hard to witness prejudice ways in one occurrence. That s the type of thing that one will never forget, and it s hard for me to imagine how one can live through it through his childhood.