“Maintaining the current status hierarchy and enforcing its rules seems ever so much more wise and moral and important when you are on the top and doing the enforcing than when you are on the bottom”
It is communicated even more by detentions, suspensions, and diagnoses. The red flag is not (primarily) punishing students (or adults) for doing things that are generally recognized as wrong or unacceptable in some particular context. It’s punishing them for doing what a particular boss/teacher decides is unacceptable - quite often as a result of vaguely worded, rarely enforced (or alternatively over-enforced zero-tolerance) rules whose justifications, if they ever existed, are long since forgotten.
