I hate that children are being taught to accept this authoritarian bullshit. It goes way, way beyond this one random event. It is a sickness infecting schools around the US. School uniforms, random drug searches, fingerprint scanning, prohibiting alternative hair color, piercings and tattoos, banning talking about alternative genders, banning non-christian religious symbols, etc. Children are being trained to be cogs in machine, indoctrinated in conformity, made to accept infringement on their freedoms and rights because they are never allowed to experience anything else. It is unethical, not just because it is wrong, but because its purpose is to brainwash people into accepting the yoke of tyranny.
I had a discussion with my parents about this lastnight.
They were saying that there are still plenty of jobs in the u.s. for people who properly educate themselves, but kids today have no attention span or self-discipline, so they don't study difficult subjects like math/hard sciences/technology.
I told them basically what you just said... that I had no interest in education in my teen years, because it seemed like schools deliberately made important subjects an agonizing experience, made the school environment feel like a prison, very obviously poured more of their already scarce funding into sports and glorifying patriotism than actual education, and supported bullies in their practice of victimizing those who still got good grades or otherwise exhibited intelligence. Everything I've managed to do with myself is in spite of our education system, and even if it were the sole cause for today's problems, I couldn't blame today's youth for being uneducated, disillusioned, and (if you add in all our problems with broken/over-worked families) averted to traditional over-achieving definitions of success.
I actually made a pin when I was 16 that read "School Sucks, Education Rules" that I wore for over a year whenever I wasn't at school. Basically stopped wearing it when I got to college.