From The Martian Time-Slip:
…the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was not there to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.
It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school, and the individual psyches of the children, and the form held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic…he went, after that, to another school entirely, one designed to rehabilitate him…He could not be taught, he could only be dealt with as <i>ill.</i>
…The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.