"Isn't it a boring game?"
Like Keith with his permanent "thread drifts" attempts at censorship - please mind your own business if you have no intentions in commenting on what is being said and leave us to deal with our own shortcomings in literary skills as best we can.
"A Catholic school sends two Muslim teenage boys home for refusing to shave their beards."
I attended a school which served two distinct communities of pupils; those of us who lived on the large Liverpool overspill council housing estate and a tiny handful of somewhat better off kids from Speke Village who hadn't made it to Grammar School.
My Secondary Modern school ruled that every boy who didn't wear a (somewhat expensive) school tie – should be sent home for part of the day, and if it happened three times we were caned.
When we entered the second form, we all were forced to wear school blazers (also expensive – out of reach for my parents).
It was a constant battle between the school authorities and the poorer parents, including my own, who genuinely couldn't afford one.
They never resorted to caning for failure, but the constant humiliation we were subjected to (particularly by the gangs of better off boys) often made caning a preferred alternative.
Friends at the nearest Catholic school were automatically beaten for being late for morning Mass.
Repeated failure to be on time led to them being hauled up before the entire assembly and publicly and extensively berated by the priest, then publicly caned by him (some of them no doubt taking extreme pleasure from it, given their now revealed history).
Severe beatings and humiliation were a natural way of life in Irish schools and English Catholic schools, likewise the response described towards tardiness and failure to attend religious assemblies, right up to fairly recently - The Christian Brothers are legendary for their brutality, even today – occasionally pipped at the post by some equally legendary orders of Nuns.
None of this measured up to being "beheaded with a rusty sword" - merely messing about with childrens' minds by beating discipline and religion into them, often causing lifelong and sometimes severe damage, so I don't know where this registers on your 'sliding scale' exactly Mike.
Parental and educationally administered physical punishment was made illegal in Britain some time ago, by fairly stringent and strongly, often bitterly opposed laws yet there are still those who publicly yearn for the 'good old days' when "we and the teachers were allowed to keep our own children in line without the interference of the "Nanny State" (just like good ol' Capital punishment).
The battle has yet to be won in Ireland - corporal punishment was banned in 1994, parental physical punishment is still under "periodic review" according to the politicians.
Jim Carroll