St Augustine’s thoughts on schooling

I find Augustine’s allusions to his early education very interesting in the light that he was an educator himself and eventually a man of the church. After all, Christianity emphasizes the virtues of obedience, particularly of elders, tedious work, patience, and suffering. Knowing St. Augustine’s background, you would think that a man as learned as he was would praise strict discipline and rigorous education for children, but he seems to take the opposite view. He claims that he learned despite of himself and his tutors (due to divine guidance of sorts) and that his accomplishments can hardly be attributed to the formal education he received as a child. If anything, he still resents the harshness of his childhood punishments as recounts them decades later as a middle-aged man. His ideas are actually quite modern and more in line with current trends in psychology and pedagogy in that children should be allowed to play and enjoy childhood and that learning should be made interesting and relevant rather than be memorization of tedious material under a threat of corporal punishment.