[Blog Entry] Battle Royale

Battle Royale

While my grade school and high school was far from perfect, one of the strange practices it had was detention.

Now I’m not saying that detention wasn’t necessary. In the end, the only thing that kept the unruly students from the meek ones was the threat of detention (or rather, informing their parents about the reprimands they received). And it wasn’t even effective at that.

Detention is an age old practice of punishment and reward. Of course what I’m complaining about is what actually happens in detention. I mean it’s not easy to convert unruly students, or simply students who made a mistake (since not everyone who gets detention deserves it, nor do they merit such “extreme” actions). But let’s assume you’re a juvenile delinquent and you’re sent to detention. The program should be designed so that you dislike the experience and reform your actions, right?

Upon reflection, detention wasn’t really scary as it was boring. Detection during my grade school and high school meant spending an hour after class hours, standing up the entire time. Yes, you heard me right. You just stood up. For an hour. Doing nothing else. You’re not supposed to talk to each other, but from the numerous amounts of people who undergo detention, that can’t be helped. In the end, one just feels that it was a very unproductive day.

Or during my grade school days, aside from standing up, we’d be required to squat for an hour or so. Sure, it’s uncomfortable and puts a strain on our legs, but aside from that, what else is gonna happen to us? And to me, isn’t that a very strange practice? I mean you come to school to train your mind, to educate yourself. When you fail to live up to that standard, what does the school do to reprimand you? They train your body. It’s as if they were saying we have two groups of people. The studious ones, and those that aren’t. For the former, they can continue with their education program. For the latter, since they’re not doing well with being educated, let’s build up their bodies. Maybe they can join the military or something. We’ll turn them into warriors due to the extensive training they receive which we merely labeled as “detention”. And half the time, the ones who undergo detention are the bullies, the rebels, the deviants. Gee, standing up for hours or squatting for half an hour doesn’t seem to me as an effective way of curbing their behavior.