Blazers and ties, classes set strictly by ability and pupils drilled to stand when a teacher enters – presumably before launching into a perfect recitation of their times tables.
My friend is in a play about a Nazi school where very talented young pupils were drilled and educated to be Nazis.
To gain good marks in the Common Entrance, most pupils are drilled within inches of their lives by their "prep" schools.
She speculates that our schools simply drill pupils with facts to pass exams, ignoring their wider social and character development.
Kim Chol had no complaints as a child, at the People's Elementary School, where every pupil was drilled in air-raid procedure and taught to march.
Plowden welcomed this, arguing that primary schools would no longer need to drill their pupils for the exam and thus to divide them into separate streams of those more or less likely to pass it.
Hong Kong is aiming to get away from its old system of learning by rote, in which pupils were endlessly drilled for a few very academic exams.
Edexcel's managing director, Jerry Jarvis, defended the move but accepted that it was likely to lead to more allegations of schools drilling pupils for their exams.
As ministers issued warnings about the "deeply troubling" rise of anti-semitism in modern Britain, Jewish primary school pupils are being drilled on what to do in the event of a terrorist attack.
This prompted generations of English teachers to drill into their pupils, including me, that to start a sentence with and, but, because or however was wrong.
