Nurture or Punishment?

My question is this: If people don’t take the time and effort to educate themselves, do they deserve equality with those who do? Do people who do not work deserve to have as much as those who do? I mentioned education first because in America the opportunities for getting an education are many, free libraries, for an example. Public schools are free or something close to it. All children of school age are accepted at the free schools. The problem is that the uneducated don’t see the advantage of education, and will resist it. This may be the schools’ fault to some extent as education is more or less forced on the children. Who doesn’t resist anything being forced upon them?
When I entered the first grade in 1942 in Salem, Illinois, I went kicking and screaming. I kept crying and finally the teacher had to call my mother and have her come and get me. My first first grade teacher, Miss Wilson, was very nice. She was an angel. She somehow nurtured me into acceptance. All was going well until we moved.
In late 1942 or early 1943, Dad was transferred to run a lumberyard at New Madrid, Missouri, a small town famous for the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. We moved from Heaven to Hell, and I discovered that Satan was a woman named Miss Mabel, who was my second first grade teacher. Nurturing stopped and punishment, or fear of it, became the guiding force of my education. Miss Mabel carried a paddle with holes drilled in it to make it more painful, and she never laid it down. She used it frequently on the “river rat boys.” “River rats” were those poor people who had to live in little shacks on the levee of the Mississippi River. I can’t remember them ever doing anything wrong, but apparently Miss Mabel thought so. She only whacked me once, because I was not sitting up straight in my chair. I often wonder if Miss Mabel wasn’t the cause of my early disinterest in education.