School
The School in St. Petersburg is the central institution of formal education and social discipline in the novel, serving as a site of rote learning, public performance, and the enforcement of adult authority, against which Tom Sawyer's rebellious ingenuity and the town's social hierarchies are most sharply defined. It is a small, isolated frame school-house where the master, Mr. Dobbins, presides from a great splint-bottom arm-chair on a raised platform, and where the rhythms of recitation, punishment, and examination structure the lives of the village children. The school is inseparable from the Sunday-school, which meets in the same church building and operates a ticket-based reward system for memorizing Scripture, and together these institutions represent the official culture that Tom constantly evades, exploits, or subverts.
Physical Setting and Daily Routine
The school-house is a little isolated frame building, and the master sits throned on high in his great splint-bottom arm-chair, often dozing, lulled by the drowsy hum of study. Monday morning begins another week's slow suffering in school, and Tom generally begins that day by wishing he had had no intervening holiday, because it makes the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. The school day is divided into recitations in reading, geography, and spelling, and the pupils sit on long pine benches. The girls' side of the school-house has a vacant place that becomes significant when Tom is ordered to sit there as punishment. The air is often dead and drowsy, with the murmuring of five and twenty studying scholars soothing the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees.
Authority and Punishment
Mr. Dobbins, the schoolmaster, has reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition to be a doctor, but poverty has decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village schoolmaster. He keeps a mysterious book under lock and key in his desk, which the pupils are perishing to glimpse. His rod and ferule are seldom idle, especially among the smaller pupils, and his lashings are very vigorous. When Tom is late, the master pronounces his full name — "Thomas Sawyer!" — which Tom knows means trouble. For confessing that he stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn, Tom receives a severe flogging and is then ordered to go and sit with the girls. The master's arm performs until it is tired and the stock of switches notably diminished. During the Examination day, the master grows severer and more exacting than ever, wanting the school to make a good showing, and he seems to take a vindictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings. The smaller boys spend their days in terror and suffering and their nights in plotting revenge, eventually conspiring with the sign-painter's boy to humiliate the master by having a cat snatch his wig, revealing his gilded bald pate.
The Sunday-School and Ticket System
Sunday-school hours are from nine to half-past ten, followed by church service. The school is a place that Tom hates with his whole heart, though Sid and Mary are fond of it. The superintendent, Mr. Walters, is a slim creature of thirty-five with a sandy goatee and a stiff standing-collar, and he delivers a customary little speech with a hymn-book in his hand. The central mechanism of the Sunday-school is a ticket system: each blue ticket is pay for two verses of recitation; ten blue tickets equal a red one; ten red tickets equal a yellow one; and for ten yellow tickets the superintendent gives a very plainly bound Bible to the pupil. Mary has acquired two Bibles through this patient work of two years. Tom, who has never really hungered for the prize but has longed for the glory and eclat that come with it, manages to trade for enough tickets to demand a Bible, creating a stunning surprise that elevates him to a place with the Judge and the other elect. When the Judge asks Tom to name the first two disciples, Tom answers "David and Goliath!"
Examination Day and Public Performance
Vacation is approaching, and the school prepares for the Examination day, a public event where the schoolhouse is brilliantly lighted and adorned with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers. The dignitaries of the town and the parents of the pupils occupy the benches, and the scholars who are to take part sit on a spacious temporary platform. The exercises include recitations, reading exercises, a spelling fight, and original compositions by the young ladies, which are characterized by a nursed and petted melancholy, a wasteful gush of fine language, and an inveterate sermon at the end. Tom steps forward with conceited confidence and soars into the "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, but breaks down in the middle of it, seized by ghastly stage-fright. The master's frown completes the disaster, and Tom retires utterly defeated. The prime feature of the evening is the original compositions, and the mayor delivers a prize for the finest effort, a nightmare of a composition that winds up with a sermon destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians.
Tom's Resistance and Subversion
Tom's relationship with the school is defined by resistance and subversion. He plays hookey, trades for tickets to win a Bible he has not earned, and uses the classroom as a stage for his romantic fantasies. When he is forced to sit with the girls as punishment, he turns the humiliation into an opportunity to court Becky Thatcher, drawing pictures on his slate and eventually whispering "I LOVE YOU." He distracts himself during lessons by playing with a tick on his slate with Joe Harper, until the master catches them and administers a tremendous whack. Tom's most dramatic act of defiance is his confession in court that he witnessed the graveyard murder, which transforms him into a glittering hero and makes his name go into immortal print in the village paper. The school, as an institution, ultimately cannot contain Tom's spirit; his adventures on Jackson's Island, his testimony at the trial, and his rescue of Becky from the cave all elevate him far above the ordinary pupil, and Judge Thatcher comes to hope that Tom will become a great lawyer or a great soldier, planning to send him to the National Military Academy.
The Revival and Its Aftermath
After Tom's recovery from the measles, a religious revival has swept the town, and everybody has "got religion," including the boys and girls. Tom finds Joe Harper studying a Testament, Ben Rogers visiting the poor with a basket of tracts, and even Huckleberry Finn greeting him with a Scriptural quotation. Tom realizes that he alone of all the town is lost, forever and forever. But the revival does not last; Tom and his friends suffer a relapse, and the normal order of school life resumes, with its punishments, pranks, and the ever-present tension between the official culture of discipline and the unofficial culture of boyhood adventure.
