[forapurpose]

> I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt there is conspiracy of school principals.

Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.

[barry-cotter]

Every single government primary and secondary education system on Earth is a direct descendant of the Prussian one. Non-existent to very limited choice of how one spends ones time, constant ranking and grading to inure people to dominance behaviours that do not come naturally, and all in groups that are age normed rather than competence or ability normed.

School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.ht...

[TomMarius]

I don't think that's true. For one, there are many publications about strict education and until relatively recently, it was the leading school of thought; we have movies featuring them, even praising them (Harry Potter for example - that was an example of a school lead as a benevolent dictatorship - that of course turned out bad later in the series). For two, people mostly don't read books about parenting but then they're parenting their kids somehow - how? Well, with whatever they picked up from their parents, TV, fiction books... Isn't it possible that it might be the same with teaching? I have some experience with working in education. Most of my former colleagues almost never think about the way they teach; you ask them why did they punish a student for disobedience (aka "he drank water even though I told him not to") and they say "because that's how it's done", you asked them why are they explaining something in that way and they don't know, they just do.

[s-shellfish]

The problem is if there's a survival benefit to becoming rigidly obedient, insulating this information would be valuable. Think about pyramid schemes.