Plenty of songs celebrate escaping from school. Take the classic “No more pencils, No more books, No more teachers’ dirty looks.”

I doubt any songs celebrate going back to school, but a lot of us remember the crisp feeling of new pens and pencils, pristine folders, blank notebooks, shiny lunchboxes and compasses. The nostalgic heart laps this kind of stuff up. Harry Potter’s back-to-school shopping in Diagon Alley for wand, cauldron, and textbooks with real teeth magically enlarges a tingle we Muggles already feel.

Hope springs eternal every fall: This time, I really will be good. There’s a seduction here, since “being good” can be so narrowly defined as doing one’s homework and not falling asleep in class. But the truth remains that, for grownups living outside the school calendar, nothing later in life – and certainly not the Damoclean list of New Year’s resolutions – really recaptures that bubbly sense of anticipated virtue.

But some of us can still hear the voice of the “whining schoolboy” within. Shakespeare described him as “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school.” One might have thought that Shakespeare, with his little Latin and less Greek, shouldn’t have had all that much to whine about. I have even less Greek than Shakespeare, but I still remember my shock when my high school Latin teacher told us that the word “school” comes from the Greek word for leisure (“schole”) – and the Latin word for elementary school (“ludus”) also means “play.”

Today, when even the kindergartners roll along hefty backpacks of homework, shades of the prison-house are falling ever earlier upon the growing boy and girl. Since both school and prison exist outside the flow of ordinary time, prison potentially holds some of the promises of leisure.

When Edmond Dantes is thrown into the Chateau d’If in Dumas’s “Count of Monte Cristo,” he is only 19, a “man of great simplicity of thought, and without education.” The first gift prison gave him was the time and solitude to recognize his shallows. The second was the companionship of the perfect teacher, the learned and resourceful Abbe Faria. Dantes willingly goes back to school. In only a year he masters five modern languages and “reads” 150 books (all stored in Faria’s head). Education makes him “a new man.”

That’s always a dangerous blessing. As the wise Abbe knows, “misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder.” I loved Dumas’s adventures when I was young – in fifth grade I was caught reading “Twenty Years After” inside my math book – but it was only when I was older and read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” that I realized Dumas’s romances held truths as well.

Thoughts of prison give another meaning to the phrase “liberal education.” Dantes and Faria seek physical freedom, but their real quest, the reason why our better selves want to go back to school at all, is liberty of mind.

Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls sees herself as a liberator, the Joan of Arc of Edinburgh. She’s wrong. She claims her students are the creme de la creme, but she’s actually molding them into cheesy replicas of herself. “Who is the greatest Italian painter?” “Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.” “That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favorite.”

Even if school can’t always be life changing, at least it’s supposed to be character-building. That notion lay behind the Duke of Wellington’s declaration that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. Since the Eton of that time pretty much resembled Dickens’s Dotheboys Hall, he was probably right. Napoleon had nothing on the headmaster Wackford Squeers.

It was really Thomas Hughes’s “Tom Brown’s Schooldays,” published in 1857, that linked picturesque architecture, empire-building, character-formation, and sport in the public imagination. The Tom Browns of England were sent to Rugby because their parents thought it might be “the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now.” And how do you do that? Assign cricket. Cricket “merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.” In this demi-paradise, there is no room for spoilsports who won’t “play up! play up! and play the game!”

The American model: Pencey Prep. “You’ve probably heard of it. You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway,” says Holden Caulfield, its most famous alum. The ads are straight out of “Tom Brown”: “Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear thinking young men.”

Holden keeps getting expelled from various schools, so he’s had a lot of experience hearing and hating cant on character formation like “Life is a game that we play according to the rules.” In his opinion, “Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right – I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”

American novelists have tended to be more uneasy about the school story. The oddly distanced narrator of “This Side of Paradise” offers a hypothesis: “We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid, and innocuous preparatory schools.” Fitzgerald is just begging us to ask, “Preparatory to what?” His answer, too, is “Nothing. No game.” And initially, when Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald’s fictional stand-in, left Minneapolis for “New England, the land of schools,” precisely what he wanted was to adapt to the bourgeoisie and become conventional.

The personification of the American boarding school ideal, to Blaine’s mind at any rate, is the Big Man: “Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values;” “Goes out for everything from a sense of duty;” “Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without his circle and always says that school days were happiest after all. Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis’ boys are doing.” Compared to his socially brainy antitype, the Slicker, the Big Man is a failure, but at least he’s not, as Holden might say, a phony.

The idea of authenticity promised by Existentialism might be one reason that teenagers are drawn to Sartre. But going back to school instinctively teaches us that hell is other people. As the inimitable English schoolboy Nigel Molesworth laments in Geoffrey Willan’s “Down with Skool,” school is filled with “various swots, bulies, cissies, milksops greedy guts and oiks with whom i am forced to mingle hemhem.” Nigel squarely faces the fact that “any skool is a bit of a shambles” and devotes his considerable daydreaming skills to devising wizard wheezes such as the Molesworth-Peason Lines-Writing Machine and penning guides to Lessons and How to Avoid Them (“english is chiefly a matter of marksmanship”). But some mysteries of school, like the food, are not meant for us lesser mortals to fathom – what can one say about “the piece of cod which passeth understanding”?

Obviously parents have repressed their memories of these horrors. F. Anstey’s Victorian comedy “Vice-Versa” serves, as its subtitle tells us, as “a lesson for fathers” – and incidentally as a model for all magical switcheroo scenarios from “Freaky Friday” to “Big.” Dick Bultitude loathes his beastly third-rate school; his pompous father glibly reminisces of “the innocent games and delights of boyhood” and wishes himself a schoolboy again. What he gets is horrible food, freezing dorm rooms, hostile classmates, and not a single unchivvied moment. Meanwhile, Dick is enjoying his after dinner cigar.

School nostalgia doesn’t always revolve around a place or a building. Laura Ingalls and her sisters were often home schooled by Ma in their little houses on the prairie. So was Tarzan, in a way, as he laboriously deciphered the “bugs” in the books in his dead parents’ cabin. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve attentively listened to things “high and strange” from the “affable archangel” Raphael. Frankenstein’s monster became fluent in French while sitting in an abandoned pigsty.

It’s a truism of progressive education that we should make the whole world our classroom. Peter Pan plays with mermaids and fairies, outwits Red Indians and pirates, flies everywhere and sees everything, but he successfully resists learning anything at all. His opposite is Kim.

If school is a game, Kim’s education fits him for the Great Game. Officially Kimball O’Hara is trained at St. Xavier’s in Lucknow. His real education, however, takes place in his vacations, when he travels on the Grand Trunk Road with the Pathan horsetrader Mahbub Ali, plays the Jewel Game in Lurgan Sahib’s shop, and takes in Huree Babu’s lectures on surveying and Shakespeare in third-class railway carriages.

Kim loves “the game for its own sake – the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies … the headlong flight from housetop to housetop,” but it is condescending to mistake Kipling’s curriculum for Kim as mere vocational spy training. Kim’s gifts for taking up the identities of India’s multitudes come from his genuine understanding of their being as well as their garb. For most importantly of all, he is chela to a lama who promises to teach him “other and better desires upon the road.”

We’re all on that road back to school, whether we know it or not. And we could do worse than listen to Kim’s lama. As he tells Kim, “Thou has loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.” Inactivity is not really an option for the hero of an adventure novel – or for us either. The lama’s lessons radiate outward to embrace us as well. Be true to your school.

Ms. Mullen last wrote for these pages on the Victorian home.