How to discipline your schoolgirl

Hello everyone!  As another week rolls around, the remake continues to roll forward.  Over the weekend, I completed all of the Queen of the Ring scenes, as well as the private strip club dances and am now getting to grips with the prefects (and who wouldn't want to do that?) as well as updating a number of sprites.  We'll have a full roundup on Wednesday, so for today, let's dive into a lore post!

A Brief History of Sapphorian School Discipline

It would horrify a traveller from the past were they to step foot inside a Sapphorian High School and see young women stripped of their clothes and dignity and paraded before their peers for relatively minor misbehaviour.  The effect, so their thinking would run, on the girl's mental wellbeing would be catastrophic.

It is true that there is a considerable increase in the level of punishment girls can expect when they enter high school, as middle schools don't have anything close to it.  Some of Sapphory's harshest middle schools do have something loosely analogous to a punishment plinth, where girls stand fully clothed, but nothing prepares a girl for the first time she is ordered to remove her uniform and display herself in her bra and panties before the entire class, or even the whole school.

Punishment Plinths were first introduced in schools about 550 years ago, as the transformation of Sapphory from utopian ideal to strict autocracy was nearing completion.  As the Royal Family tightened its grip over all of the country's institutions, the doctrine of complete obedience to authority began to take centre stage, and like all of history's other tyrannies before it, targeted the young.

Nude and corporal punishments were already a fact of life for adult Sapphorians by this time, with stockades and display posts having been a common sight in every town and city for decades.  Following the crushing of the Okonrin uprising early in the country's history, and subsequent humiliations of its ringleaders, the authorities had seen how powerful the effect of this as a deterrent was, and also set a precedent by its use.  

New laws were passed, mandating the humiliation of convicted criminals.  Seeing those who had done genuine wrong treated this way pleased the majority of Sapphorian women, but too late, they realised they were tacitly giving their permission for it to be used more and more widely, and for lesser offences.  Within a few years, it was simply accepted as being how crime is punished.

Which brings us to schools. The government, eager to create an even more obedient and docile generation of Sapphorians, realised that teaching it to the young would be far more effective than trying to correct women who were already adults.  Heated debates were had over how far to go with this policy.  Some believed that humiliating schoolgirls was a step too far, but other voices succeeded in convincing the Queen that a temporary trial should be attempted.

Of course, there's nothing as permanent as a temporary government program, and the first handful of schools to pilot the stripping of wayward girls began to operate.  Even in Sapphory, the initiative received considerable kickback at first from parents, who's 18-year-olds came home distraught, reporting having been ordered to strip in front of the class or even put in a central corridor in their underwear.

The response of the government was to double down.  Convinced that the parents, who had not been subjected to this process themselves simply didn't understand its benefits, they pressed ahead, allowing any mothers who wished to withdraw their daughters from a participating school to do so.  Over 75% left, and class sizes were reduced accordingly.  However, determined to swing public opinion, the government also poured massive resources into these schools, providing the remaining girls with the best possible education.  

The following year, the already fairly tightly controlled press was able to report that almost every single girl had graduated with honours from their high schools and attained places at Sapphory's best universities.  With this, public opinion shifted as predicted, and the number of schools participating in the program mushroomed.

With the helpless girls now able to be stripped, and later also disciplined in other bottom-striking-related ways (happy, censors?) attention now turned to the teachers.  Without males, the fear that teachers would abuse their position was less, but not zero. A variety of checks were implemented, and the teachers trained in a similar manner to town guards to administer these um... innovative new techniques. 

It was correctly assumed that once teachers were being drawn from a pool of women who had themselves been through this process, things would even themselves out, but attrition in the profession was very high at the time, as many women simply couldn't bring themselves to do this to teenage girls.  This resulted in a culture shift within the teaching profession, as those who stayed were more inclined to the authoritarian end.  This side-effect hadn't been foreseen by the Government, but was very welcome.  It made it far easier to make the change permanent and to recruit teachers comfortable with what they must do to their charges, which became self-reinforcing.

Within 10 years, every high school in Sapphory employed some method of humiliation-based punishment.  As the new culture took root, and schools became concerned as much with teaching obedience as with educating, new methods were tried and adopted.  Underwear rules became normal, then underwear inspections, then short skirts to make it harder to disobey.  

Within 30 years of the first trials, most schoolteachers had themselves been subjected to this in their youth, and saw nothing untoward about it.  Only the older generation expressed any disapproval, and by this point, it was a fait accompli.  Thanks to the government's initial nurturing of those first girls to undergo it, there has remained to this day a strong perception that it improves educational outcomes, and mothers will try their hardest to get their daughters into the strictest schools, as well as often emulating this method of discipline at home, much to the girls' dismay!

Some methods, more extreme than those in use today have been attempted throughout the centuries as the system has sought to innovate.  At one time, bondage was extensively used to humiliate and control wayward girls.  This is now considered somewhat old-fashioned, as well as ineffective, as it does nothing to teach obedience, but is still very much in the arsenal of more traditionally-minded teachers, and has shown some signs of a resurgence.

For Missy's generation, and even their parents and grandparents before them, this is just how things have always been done.  Middle School girls are warned that it is coming, but many are still shocked by its reality.  Nevertheless, five years later, the 23-year-olds emerge from high school with thick-skinned bottoms and a hatred of those two words that strike fear into Sapphorian schoolgirls everywhere: Punishment Plinth.

I hope you've all enjoyed this glimpse into Sapphory's culture!  I'll be back on Wednesday with the remaster progress report.

Trinian