Public domain Twain

"The children were put to school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell the words or take breath."

Mark Twain, The Gilded Age (1873)

(Attributed to Twain in Charles Neider's 1965 edition "The Adventures of Col. Sellers," which drops material written by Charles Dudley Warner.)