I’ve been reading The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, who, besides being friends with Henry and William James, and the whole Emerson family, was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and thus the great grandson of John Adams. Speaking of himself and school, he said:
“He hated it because he was herded together with a crowd of boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him.”
I think that’s a real gem, but to unearth one of these, you have to wade through hours of tedious first-person history of the Union’s legation to England during the Civil War.