Botchan by Natsume Soseki

Writing a response paper on "Botchan" by Soseki. The story is about a young man who moves from Tokyo to teach at a middle school in the country. Botchan was a reckless, bad kid so it's ironic that he's become a school teacher himself. The whole novel is rather blunt with hyperbolized text, but it has some interesting points about morality. Botchan is pretty bitter in general because his family didn't love him and now has no faith in the human race, really.

"Now that I thought about it, though, I realized that most people actually encourage you to turn bad. They seem to think that if you don't, you'll never get anywhere in the world. And then on those rare occasions when they encounter somebody who's honest and pure-hearted, they look down on him and say he's nothing but a kid, a Botchan. If that's the way it is, it would be better if they didn't have those ethics classes in elementary school and middle school where the teacher is always telling you to be honest and not to lie. The schools might as well just go ahead and teach you how to tell lies, how to mistrust everybody, and how to take advantage of people. Wouldn't their students, and the world at large, be better off that way?..."