Chances are your public school doesn't have boarders. If your parents/ siblings ever woke you up...they were fagging (if not voluntary). Admittedly, some fag systems were just pure bullying, but generally not. If course, the smokers - after being woke up - would go outside and suck on a fag, but that's another story.

The writer known as Orwell doesn't seem to have been fond of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887786

[He went to boarding school on scholarship, so that may have been another reason to have been treated poorly by the full-fare students?]

I would pay large sums of money to have my kids learn the lesson that there is a hierarchy and one must always start on the bottom to understand every layer.

That isn’t what one learns. One learns to cheat, lie, and steal, and to exploit systems and manipulate people. You don’t survive if you play by the rules.

Public schools produce sociopaths, in general.

Still, a valuable skillset, I must say.