Does the restrictive nature of school and church lead Tom Sawyer and other children to be more inventive outside the school?

In Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain articulates a parody of the two institutions that provide the pillars of society: school and church, and very especially, Sunday school. Tom is a romantic hero with a feverish imagination who resists the confinement, physical and emotional, of the classroom and the chapel by continuously devising new adventures in the river and the forest. With his Quixotic mentality, Tom becomes the natural leader of his gang, always imagining new and exciting undertakings to avoid the dullness of life in the town of St. Petersburg. An avid reader of romantic novels such as Robin Hood, as don Quixote was a voracious reader of novels of chivalry, Tom populates the natural surroundings of the town with pirates and treasures, villains and damsels in distress, and engages his gang in the most feverish, and at times dangerous, games.

School and church both serve the purpose of transmitting social, cultural and religious values, but in St. Petersburg both institutions also symbolize the profound hypocrisy of its inhabitants and the superficiality of the teachings that both instil in the children. For example, religious instruction consists of learning the Bible by heart, which Tom refuses to do, even though he is able to recite whole passages of Robin Hood. While the town represents the space of prosaic and hypocritical social conventions, the river represents the space of freedom from social constraints and the realm of the imagination. Twain was always critical of fake religiosity and repressive schooling, as seen once and again in his writings, and he famously said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Like the American Transcendentalists, and like Walt Whitman, Twain thought that true learning was found in nature, not in the classroom.