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About 15 years ago I had a brief stint as a non-educational worker in a public school. They had a rule that the entire class had to line up in alphabetical order each time they entered or left any space as a group.

To enter or leave the building, the hallway, the classroom. To go to the library, the gym. For group bathroom breaks. For recess and for lunch. Seriously they spent about 20% of the day being corralled into lining up. I don't know how the teachers tolerated it. The kids never cooperated with it easily and by the time the teacher got to the end of the line getting people in the right order the kids at the front had moved themselves around. Everyone going to giggle with their best friend or get away from someone they didn't like, whatever.

We didn't have a rule like this when I was growing up but I did have the feeling it was stuff like this all the time. I literally felt they were trying to brain wash us into being compliant ever since I was very little.

School is deliberately set up to produce good and bad students. The working class is subdivided into higher-paying higher-status workers, precarious low-wage workers and the unemployed, and schools are tasked with reproducing and justifying these divisions. Pretty sure this can't be done without some pretty fucked up abusive bullying, and so here we are, most are more or less traumatized by school.

School sucked for me because most of my teachers really had no business being teachers.

That and having to sit through religious propaganda, which I hated even at the time, plus in retrospect other propaganda about capitalism and other weird stuff like whether cow's milk and meat are 100% necessary for human beings (turns out the answer is no ).

Every once in a while I would chew some food then spit it in the toilet and pretend I had thrown up. My parents never caught on

I liked school.

I just fucking wish school would stay at school and they'd fuck off with homework. I'm already giving you half of my day, why the fuck you gotta take more from me??

Getting a fever that would hit the sweet spot where you can stay home but aren't suffering and can play ps2 in a blanket

I know it's idealistic of me, but I still believe that it would be somehow possible to make public schools something that kids want to go to, or at the least don't experience as a low-key and long-term traumatic experience. Tearing kids out of bed as early as schools typically start is where that hurt begins, and it sucks.

I have a learning disability when it comes to math and on the regular I'd be belittled in a very passive aggressive way by math teachers (usually men) when I was picked to go up to the board and do an equation or some such. Even being placed in special math classes I still floundered, I don't know if I have some brain damage or what but I just can't do it. Anyway this was way before people became accepting of people with disabilities and I get mercilessly mocked when kids found out I was in special classes. So I tried my damnedest to keep it secret that I was since I felt such deep shame. Anyway all of this compounded on me HATING school. Middle school through Junior High were hell. I didn't start to actually enjoy classes until I got to senior year and I could pick what I actually wanted to learn.

I did well in college though go figure. Economics class was something I was good at (with a handy scientific calculator). Who would have thought years later a business major would be a commie.