Having done public, private, and boarding school during middle and high school I found it very reminiscent of the kind of BS from that age period. It really made me cringe in memory of that crap and it's really unfortunate that that sort of stuff is still so common everywhere. There really should be zero tolerance for that sort of thing.
shareThis just makes me even more angry. The movie takes place decades ago but the fact that this still goes on unknowingly to most... it's rage-worthy.
shareI think school administrators know it goes on, you'd have to be practically blind to not be, but the overall attitude they take is that it's just the nature of how adolescent kids behave when growing up. They're expected to "grow" from freshman victims into senior victimizers and the hazing and pecking order is just part of the process of preparing them for life.
Which is total BS. Life in civilized society is not spent worrying about defending yourself physically from roving bands of sadists three times your size. I see no benefit from battered victims "evolving" into cruel predators who learn to participate in and perpetuate the cycle, in fact it's got to be psychologically damaging and harmful for society for many of its members to adapt to internalizing violence by taking it out on someone even more vulnerable than themselves. That sort of behavior gets you locked up in real life.
I attended a boarding school too and let me say that whilst I'm not an advocate of those sort of institutions, where reprehensible bullying certainly can and does flourish given the right conditions, the stuff that we see in this film is certainly highlighted to achieve dramatic ends. I've never ever heard of secondary boarding schools where the "prefects" totally run the disciplinary school program, completely independent of the staff and school administration, which we see occurring in this film.
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