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 adults or teachers. If anything, they were AWOL. It was the students that really made each other’s life hell. Of course, we were teenagers. Much later, I stopped blaming the individuals and started blaming the institution.
Here’s a tiny anecdote. One guy, who I think was genuinely evil, took psychology as a minor subject. As an experiment, he decided to drive another, younger, vulnerable pupil mad. Gaslighting him, messing with his head, that kind of stuff. And he succeeded!