My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian…
Throughout, it was (often school-endorsed) tribal warfare and arbitrary justice at the hands of masters and prefects. Eat or be eaten. It churned out future politicians.
We had literal knife-fights in the dormitories. It was normal to drag someone out of bed at 3am and beat the shit out of them with doorknobs. My dorm-mates, aged 14, kept a friend of mine cocooned in duct tape, upside down in a wardrobe, for an entire school day. I found him that evening during prep, and took a cricket bat to the ringleader. The poor bastard got detention and satisfecit for jocking classes. I was suspended.
I once had septicaemia from an infected wound, and the matron’s response was to fling a mop at me as I lay on the kitchen floor in a puddle of pus and blood while telling me to “clean up your fucking mess”. I blacked out at that point, and the aforementioned friend saved my life by calling an ambulance - I awoke in hospital weeks later. She was actually, unbelievably, fired over the incident.
So much of my behaviour, two decades on, is still driven by my experiences there, and the same applies to those few of my cohort I’m in touch with or aware of the fates of. Constant paranoia that you’re going to be double-crossed or arbitrarily beaten, a complete lack of faith in institutions of any variety, and bitterness and contempt for those who did this to me (my parents, the bastards that ran the schools (some of whom are now gratifyingly in prison)).
They should be illegal.