In the poem "The Schoolboy," do you think the poet is arguing against education? Explain.

In "The Schoolboy," William Blake offers a meditation on nature, childhood, and education. From the start, the poem draws a sharp contrast between the natural world and the traditional classroom. The narrator praises the outdoors as a place of joy full of budding flowers, where child and bird can sing along together. The classroom is deemed dull in comparison:

But to go to school in a summer morn,—O it drives all joy away!Under a cruel eye outworn,The little ones spend the dayIn sighing and dismay.
Ah then at times I drooping sit,And spend many an anxious hour;Nor in my book can I take delight,Nor sit in learning's bower,Worn through with the dreary shower. (lines 6–15)

School seems like a prison, closed in and confining, whereas nature is wide open and free. In the next stanza, Blake likens a child trapped in a classroom to a bird trapped in a cage, suggesting that neither is in their natural state: the bird "born for joy" (16) doesn't feel like singing in its cage, and a child "But droop[s] / And forget[s] his youthful spring" (19–20) when he's inside looking out. At this point, it might seem like Blake disapproves of education, but there is an important distinction that he makes: time and place. In the midst of summer, when nature calls most to the young, the poem advocates that they be allowed to enjoy it. There is a season to everything, and summer is not the season for a brick and mortar classroom. This is not perhaps an anti-education sentiment so much as a suggestion for approaching education differently.
Looking back at lines 6–15, we can see that it's not learning or schools in general that are being critiqued; instead, the poem shows how learning is not as effective when the child would rather go outdoors and play. Blake frames it as natural for children, just like the birds, to want to be outside and singing. Blake doesn't say that children shouldn't take delight in books and learning; he emphasizes instead how it is harder for them to focus on such things when nature is in bloom. Like there are seasons, there are stages in life, and childhood is a time in which children can learn and grow best in the natural world. Keeping them stifled inside is cutting them off from their potential, like cutting down a flower before it fully blooms: "buds are nipped, / And blossoms blown away" (21–22). Blake's poem advocates an approach to childhood that recognizes how children actually think and behave and doesn't demand that they change too soon.
Like many Romantic poets, Blake believed in the power of nature to touch and teach the individual, and children are no exception; they are, in fact, the best example. The Romantics believed that children were to be celebrated and even emulated for their innocence and connection to nature. For these poets, nature represented the vast expanse of knowledge and experience open to humanity, and many poems from the Romantic period focus on various aspects of the natural world. One of Blake's contemporaries, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, expressed this sentiment in his poem "Frost at Midnight," calling nature "the Great universal Teacher!"
In this sense, we might interpret Blake's poem as a call for a more natural education, encouraging children to learn the beauty and joy of the world around them.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-romantics