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Just about all of it. In the first place, a generalization covering both British and American schools, no time frame, is doomed, the corporal punishments alleged don't take place in American schools to much extent since they have been banned (public schools anyway). If you want a generalization that Rejali would accept, it would be British and American police departments, because of the "third degree".
Second, would either you or Alice Miller, or anyone else who wants to allege that the same behavior goes on, please like to tell me when strappado was practiced in British and American schools, like with names, dates, and individuals on whom it was practiced? How about crushing genitals (i.e. permanent damage)? How about prolonged sensory deprivation and illegally long and unbroken solitary confinement (that would be 30 days or more without a period of sunlight for an hour a day, etc.)? How about heat and cold torture (induced hyper- or hypothermia), or lesions of frostbite, or bombardment with loud noises and light, or gang interrogation of more than 24 hours, or stress positions (until limbs swell), or short shackling, or blows to the body, or waterboarding, or belly slaps, or withholding of medications for life-threatening injuries, or threats of death to next of kin or self, or incommunicado holdings? Those are just an incomplete list of the ones practiced by the Americans.
So tell me which school these are practiced at? Do you see the problem? At some point, the distinction isn't a distinction in degree, its a distinction in kind.
Third, as I reiterated several times now, from Rejali, the torturers are, when they commence their work, very, very normal. They are people doing a job. The roots of why they are being asked to do this job are at the societal level, and are the three reasons that Rejali gave.
Fourth, they are also, in the case of the Americans, soldiers in many cases, which means that they are from a class of individuals for whom it isn't correct to assume, as so many academic psychologists do going back to Freud's neurotic upper-class Viennese women, that their most traumatic experiences occur during childhood. If that's even a good assumption about whole swaths of society. I noticed this once when I had to fill out a psych questionnaire for tests I needed to have done. They assumed everything traumatic enough to profoundly affect my psyche happened as a child. That might be true of faculty, students, and staff at an elite academic institution, their prime clinical base, but is certainly wasn't true with me, nor with tons of people in society. For combat troops who've seen war, it is most certainly false.
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward. That singles out the Bush people in a very small group. Even the Gestapo, though often alleged to have been top down on torture, was not, according to Rejali.
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no. AKA Smith mentioned Zimbardo. It isn't true he doesn't have causal theories, they are in his book, The Lucifer Effect, Chapter 16, starting on page 445 (in the paperback edition). He has charts and a multistep plan and the whole works. Most people will behave cruelly if ordered to in the circumstances that exist in the prisons America has set up (see Gray, for instance, http://www.irct.org/Default.aspx?ID=1038 and scroll down). That isn't because everyone was treated cruelly in schools, it's because most people will behave cruelly, because, as Zimbardo notes, disobeying that order to torture is heroic, not normal. Torture stops when the system that causes it is dismantled (that is really Rejali's point, but could also be Zimbardo, or Arendt or many others), not when we put superior individuals in.
