Augustine started characteristically at home, that is, with memories of his own childhood sufferings. As a schoolboy, he hated being beaten, which was then, as for centuries afterward, the principal pedagogical technique for encouraging diligent learning. He earnestly prayed to God that he might be spared the whip. But his prayers were to no avail: if he were idle, he was flogged. It seemed grotesquely unfair, since the adults who did the flogging were themselves guilty of idleness and worse, and the Confessions registers, with subdued passion, the outrage that still lingered in his breast.
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