When An Education System is a Little Bit Culty: The Starting Point is Subtle
PART 1/2
I've spend a lot of my professional life thinking about coercive control — how ordinary people end up losing their autonomy inside high-control groups. So it was strange to end up on the other side of that dynamic myself, recently, in a situation with no charismatic leader, no demands to cut off my family or hand over my money, nothing anyone could reasonably point to as abuse. Just an institution, doing what institutions do. And still — it felt a little bit culty.
I've started calling it Level 4. Not because I think the organisation involved is a high-control group. It isn't. It's my own shorthand for something more subtle: the point where ordinary institutional processes start reproducing some of the same dynamics that make high-control environments so hard to live inside.
Because here's the thing I've come around to. A behaviour doesn't have to reach cult-level before it does damage.
The problem with only looking for extremes
When people talk about coercive control, attention goes straight to the dramatic stuff — isolation, threats, surveillance, financial control, punishment, intimidation. The obvious signs.
But coercive dynamics sit on a continuum, and the low end looks nothing like that. It looks like unclear rules. It looks like the person with institutional authority knowing exactly how the system works while the person subject to it doesn't. Requirements that seem to shift. Information that's oddly hard to get. Questions that never quite get answered. You're expected to navigate an increasingly complicated process without ever being given what you'd need to actually navigate it.
And when something goes wrong, responsibility has a funny way of migrating downward. You should have known. You should have asked. You didn't follow the process. You needed to speak to the right person.
It’s about thinking in degrees - and I don't mean education degrees
At the extreme end, coercive control can profoundly restrict a person’s autonomy.
At the lower end, we can encounter much smaller versions of the same underlying dynamics:
information asymmetry;
dependency on authority;
opaque rules;
limited ability to challenge decisions;
procedural barriers;
shifting responsibility;
and the gradual erosion of a person’s sense that they have any meaningful control over what happens next.
What happened to me
I got tangled up in an educational institution's process for recognising prior learning. I made an initial mistake — submitted an application before speaking to the right coordinator — and that one's on me, no argument.
But then I asked for help, because I genuinely didn't understand the process, and the answers I got back from the people who were supposed to understand it were vague at best. The whole thing dragged on far longer than I expected. I had to keep attending a course while waiting to hear whether I was already competent in the areas I'd asked to have recognised. I lost an absurd amount of time trying to work out what evidence they wanted, what they'd already looked at, what they hadn't, and what I was actually meant to do next.
It began to feel less like education and more like gatekeeping. The institution seemed to possess a body of sacred administrative knowledge that was not simply explained to learners; it had to be discovered through initiation. There were procedures within procedures, rules about who could explain the rules, and seemingly obscure requirements that only became apparent once you had already failed to follow them. The learner was expected to navigate the rites of passage, demonstrate sufficient endurance and compliance, and only then gain access to the knowledge needed to navigate the system. What should have been education increasingly felt like an initiation ritual — a test of obedience and endurance rather than competence.
Somewhere in there, the question quietly changed shape. It stopped being why is this process so hard for a student to get through and became why didn't the student get through it correctly.
That shift matters more than it sounds like it should.
The map problem
Institutions have something individuals don't: the map. They know the terminology, the procedures, who's responsible for what, which forms matter, which decisions can be appealed, what counts as acceptable evidence. They know all this because they built the system, or they run it, or they've spent years inside it.
The person trying to get through the system doesn't have any of that. So when a process is complicated, the weight of figuring it out lands on exactly the person with the least power and the least information to do it. Nobody has to be malicious for that to happen. Nobody even has to be trying to manipulate anyone. It's enough that the system makes total sense to the people who live inside it and none at all to the person trying to get in.
Why "Level 4"?
I'm not offering a clinical category or accusing anyone of coercive control. It's just a way of talking about degree.
At the extreme end, coercive control can strip away someone's autonomy almost entirely. At the low end, you get pale, everyday versions of the same ingredients: information asymmetry, dependency on whoever's in charge, opaque rules, limited room to push back, procedural obstacles, blame that slides downhill, and — slowly — the sense that you don't have much say over what happens to you next.
Most of the time it's mundane. That's the part worth sitting with.
How small things add up to a little bit culty
One confusing email isn't coercive control. One bad form isn't. One delay isn't. Being told you missed a step in a process nobody explained properly isn't, either — not on its own. But when small abuses of power start to add up, to those with a back ground in high-control groups, it feels uncomfortably a little bit cult. It's the space a lot of well meaning organisations can go, while for consumers its the beginning of caution needed.
Do we need to follow the rules?
Yes. And in a healthy educational system, the psychologically informed approach also asks:
What do those rules do to people?
Those are not the same question.
I’m not arguing that institutions should abandon standards, accountability or legitimate assessment requirements.
Quite the opposite.
Good systems can have rigorous standards while still being transparent, accessible and humane.
They can explain the rules.
They can identify genuine gaps rather than creating unnecessary work.
They can communicate promptly.
They can acknowledge mistakes without turning them into excuses for everything that follows.
And they can also recognise that the person on the other side of the process is a human being, not merely an administrative problem.
When enough points stack up, something shifts. You start depending on the institution just to tell you what's going on. You spend more and more of your time trying to decode what you're supposed to do. You get reluctant to push back on a decision because you don't know what it'll cost you. At some point you start wondering whether the problem is the system, or whether it's actually you.
And you can end up feeling powerless inside something that was theoretically there to help you.
Compliant isn't the same as okay
An institution can follow every one of its own rules and still put someone through something needlessly harmful. Compliance is only ever asking one question — did we follow the process? It's not asking what the process did to the person going through it.
I'm not saying institutions should drop their standards or stop holding people accountable. If anything, the opposite — a system can be rigorous and transparent, explain itself, spot genuine gaps instead of inventing busywork, communicate on time, own its mistakes instead of using them to justify everything after. It can remember that the person on the other end is a person, not a support ticket. That is what healthy leadership looks like.
What this changed for me
This has made me think we should be paying more attention to ordinary groups — schools, universities, workplaces, government departments, health services, professional bodies. None of these are inherently coercive. But all of them run on power, and wherever there's an imbalance of power, there's room for a process to tip into something more controlling than it needs to be.
Sometimes that's deliberate. Usually it isn't. Sometimes it's barely visible at all — just enough to leave someone thinking, I don't understand how I ended up here, and I don't see a way out.
That's my Level 4. Not a cult. Not abuse. Maybe not even misconduct. Just a pile of ordinary institutional behaviours that, added together, can do real psychological damage.
Which might be exactly why they're worth paying attention to. Harm doesn't only start where things get extreme. Sometimes it starts much earlier — with a process nobody bothered to make understandable.
Wondering if your school or institution is a coercive high-control group?
Part 2: School Cults: When Education Becomes a High-Control Environment
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