School Cults: When Education Becomes a High-Control Environment
We tend to picture a "cult" as something that lives outside ordinary society — a strange religious group, a charismatic leader, an isolated compound, a set of beliefs so extreme they're obviously wrong from the outside. Schools don't usually come to mind.
But schools are unusually powerful environments. They hold authority over children, control access to information, decide what counts as acceptable behaviour and what counts as success, and shape how young people come to understand themselves and the world. Most schools use that authority well. Some don't. And the recent attention on schools like Redeemer Baptist School and Fitzroy Community School gives us a reason to ask an uncomfortable question: what happens when an educational institution slides from legitimate authority into something closer to control for its own sake?
The school as a closed system
There's nothing inherently coercive about having rules. Children need boundaries, teachers need authority, schools need policies and standards, and education always involves some asymmetry — the teacher knows things the student doesn't, and the institution carries responsibilities an individual student simply doesn't have.
The trouble starts when that authority becomes unquestionable. A high-control educational environment tends to develop a recognisable set of habits: information gets tightly held, questioning authority is discouraged or quietly punished, conformity is rewarded over independent thought, the institution's beliefs get treated as settled fact, dissent gets read as disloyalty or a personal failing, students are steered away from outside perspectives, parents get cast as people who "just don't understand how we do things," the rules get more rigid and more intrusive over time, and slowly the institution becomes the main source of a student's sense of identity and belonging.
None of that, on its own, makes a school a cult. The real question isn't whether a school has rules — it's how power operates inside those rules, how much autonomy people actually retain, and what happens to someone who questions the system.
The extreme end of the spectrum
The scrutiny around schools like Redeemer Baptist School and Fitzroy Community School matters precisely because it shows why this conversation is worth having. These cases shouldn't be casually equated with an ordinary school that has a rigid policy or an overbearing teacher — where there are serious allegations of abuse, exploitation, ideological control, isolation or humiliation, we're talking about something far more serious. But extreme examples are useful for exactly that reason: they make the underlying mechanisms easier to see.
At the far end, control can become so total that an institution isn't just shaping what a student learns, but how they think, how they relate to other people, and how they see themselves. At that point the school stops being a school and becomes something closer to an environment that defines reality for the people inside it. Once that happens, leaving — or even just disagreeing — gets extraordinarily hard.
But high control doesn't start at the extreme
This is where the idea of a "school cult" becomes genuinely useful rather than just provocative. The usual question when a case like this comes to light is how could anyone let this happen. I think a better question is what are the small, ordinary behaviours that make increasingly high levels of control start to feel normal.
Because these cultures rarely begin with something spectacular. They begin with a rule nobody's allowed to question. A process that doesn't make much sense but has to be followed anyway. An authority figure who won't explain a decision because "that's just how we do things." Information that's oddly hard to get hold of. A student who raises a fair concern and gets told the problem is their attitude. Someone learning, gradually, that compliance is just easier than asking questions.
Any one of those looks small. Enough of them together build a culture where the institution's convenience consistently outweighs the individual's autonomy.
The spectrum of educational control
It's worth thinking about schools on a spectrum rather than in two categories. At one end is a genuinely healthy learning environment — one with real authority, but authority that explains itself. Students can ask questions. Rules have a visible purpose. Mistakes get corrected instead of buried. Different needs get accommodated. Teachers can be challenged respectfully, and information isn't hidden.
At the other end is the high-control environment: authority concentrated in fewer hands, questioning made to feel unsafe, information tightly controlled, conformity rewarded, dissent carrying real consequences, and a worldview that becomes almost impossible to push back on.
Most schools sit somewhere in the enormous grey area between those two points, and that's really where things get interesting — because an institution doesn't need to be a cult to show cult-like dynamics, and a dynamic doesn't need to be extreme to cause real harm.
My own experience made this uncomfortably concrete
I recently went through an educational process that got me thinking about this spectrum in a way I hadn't expected. To be clear, I'm not putting my own experience anywhere near the serious allegations attached to the extreme examples above — it wasn't that. It sat much lower on the spectrum. But that's exactly what made it useful to think about.
The institution was legitimate, the people involved were professionals, and nobody was demanding loyalty or telling me what I was allowed to believe. And yet parts of it felt strangely familiar to someone who's spent years studying coercive control. There was heavy emphasis on following the prescribed process. There was specialised terminology that worked almost like an insider language. There were procedures for finding out what the procedures were, and rules about who was allowed to explain the rules. And when something went wrong, the focus landed on whether I'd followed the correct process — rarely on whether the system had made that process clear enough to follow in the first place.
Eventually I found myself thinking: this is what low-level institutional control looks like. Not abuse, not a cult with a big C — just a culture where the individual is expected to adapt to the system, rather than the system asking what it could reasonably do to meet the individual halfway.
What made this particularly hard to shake off was that it happened inside teacher and trainer education specifically.
A person doesn't have to be imprisoned, threatened or physically harmed for their autonomy to be gradually eroded.
They just need to be repeatedly being told:
This is the only way.
Don't question the process.
You should have known.
That's not how we do things.
Just follow the manual.
And eventually this teaches people something quite powerful:
Your judgement is less important than the system's rules.
Most people will simply comply.
Some will become frustrated.
Some will leave.
And some will start questioning whether the problem is actually themselves.
That is where low-level coercive dynamics become psychologically significant.
The irony of teaching people to how to teach with school cult dynamics
Modern educational practice tells us learners are diverse — we're expected to account for different learning needs, neurodiversity, foundation skills, mental health, accessibility, reasonable adjustment. We're taught to build safe, inclusive environments and to engage learners rather than simply demand compliance from them. None of that stops applying just because the "learners" are training to become educators themselves. If we teach people that good teaching means flexibility and responsiveness, those same principles ought to show up in how we teach the teachers — otherwise we end up in the strange position of instructing people in learner-centred practice inside a culture that expects the learner to do all the accommodating.
We don't want to inadvertently train trainers in school cult dynamics — that is, teach educational strategies that rely on coercive control. The days of old-school authoritarian teachers and compliant students are long gone, and I for one think that's a good thing. It never served me well as a student, and quite simply, the most rewarding moments of my teaching career have been watching my learners joyfully learn new skills. There's no joy in watching them learn through stress and strain.
When compliance gets mistaken for competence
Education legitimately needs standards. Competency matters, assessment matters, consistency matters. But there's a real risk of confusing competence with compliance.
A learner can be perfectly capable of reaching an outcome while getting there differently from how the person assessing them expected. A teacher can understand a concept without using the exact terminology another teacher prefers. A professional can demonstrate a skill through genuine experience rather than a narrowly prescribed classroom exercise, and an experienced learner might have something worth contributing that doesn't fit the institution's existing template.
When the answer is always "this is the process, follow it," it's worth asking whether what's actually being measured is competence — or just someone's ability to navigate the institution.
The quiet harm of low-level coercion
I think we tend to assume coercion only matters once it gets extreme. It doesn't. Nobody has to be imprisoned or threatened for their autonomy to be worn down gradually. Being told often enough that this is the only way, don't question the process, you should have known, that's not how we do things, just follow the manual teaches people something powerful: that their own judgement matters less than the system's rules.
Most people will just comply. Some get frustrated. Some leave. And some start to wonder whether the problem is actually them. That's where low-level coercive dynamics become genuinely significant, psychologically — not in the dramatic moment, but in the accumulation.
Education is supposed to teach independent thinking — including about itself
Maybe the biggest contradiction here is that education exists to produce independent thinkers. We want students who question assumptions, weigh evidence, solve unfamiliar problems, and make their own informed decisions. Which means we should be especially wary of educational cultures that quietly discourage exactly those habits in the people going through them.
A healthy institution should be able to tolerate questions about itself. It should be able to explain why a rule exists, admit when a process isn't working, tell the difference between a genuine requirement and an unnecessary barrier — and hear "there must be another way of doing this" without treating it as resistance.
Where should we draw the line?
My 12-point criteria attempt to define when a group, including schools cross over the line into cult territory, but it doesn't go far enough in providing concrete checklists of what to look out for, and I don't think every rigid or poorly run school deserves that label — if anything, the label can obscure more than it reveals. What's more useful, I think, is asking about power and autonomy directly:
Can students question authority without consequence?
Can parents challenge the institution without being punished or sidelined?
Is information actually transparent and accessible?
Are the rules proportionate, and do they make sense?
Is individuality genuinely welcomed, or just tolerated?
Can people disagree without being treated as disloyal?
Does the institution ever admit its own mistakes?
Are students' needs weighed against institutional convenience, or automatically overruled by it?
Is compliance being mistaken for good behaviour?
Does the place encourage people to think independently — including about the place itself?
These are questions worth asking of any educational environment, not just the ones that make headlines.
The spectrum matters
Redeemer Baptist School and Fitzroy Community School sit at a very different level of concern than an ordinary school with poor communication, rigid processes, or one unconventional teacher — that distinction has to be kept. But keeping the distinction doesn't mean ignoring the spectrum. At one end there's fairly ordinary institutional rigidity. Further along, cultures of excessive conformity and unquestioned authority. Further still, those same patterns become systematic and genuinely harmful.
When I assessed my most resent encounter with an education system that felt a little bit culty, they only scored a total of nine out of thirty-six on my rubric. In other words, across the twelve criteria, some categories got zero, nine registered as one out of three. It's interesting, none of the features were above one, and yet I left feeling opposed to submitting to the will of the leadership and complying to rules that forsook human nature, and common sense.
The point isn't to start calling everything a cult. It's to recognise that control runs on a spectrum, and harm can show up well before an institution reaches the extreme end of it. That's probably the most important thing my own experience left me with — you don't have to wait until an environment is obviously abusive before asking whether the way it uses its power is actually healthy.
Sometimes the warning signs are much quieter than that. Sometimes they look like a policy. Sometimes they look like a form. Sometimes they just look like a teacher saying, "just follow the process."
And sometimes the most useful question you can ask is simply: why?
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