Every boarding school has its own idea of discipline. At the Nigerian boarding school that TikTok creator Oluwaseyi attended, it came with a literal “flogging stick,” kept on hand for students who got answers wrong or stepped out of line.
Oluwaseyi, by her own account, was usually spared. A consistently top student, she says she didn’t miss a single question during multiplications drills in class. Meanwhile, around her, classmates were getting flogged “left and right.”
But then, her teacher did an UNO reverse and asked Oluwaseyi herself to take on the cane. The teacher told her: You do it.
When the top student became the enforcer
Basically, Oluwaseyi was made to hit her own classmates for getting maths questions wrong. Yeah, talk about empowerment.
And the first person? None other than her very own romantic interest! She says she went easy on him, giving him a token tap rather than a real hit. Her teacher wasn’t having it: she slapped Oluwaseyi on the spot and warned her that if she didn’t cane properly, the punishment would be doubled onto her instead.
Oluwaseyi’s response, recounted afterwards with more amusement than anger, was that some of the answers barely deserved punishment in the first place — pointing out, as an example, that a wrong answer of 14 for 5 x 2 wasn’t exactly a crime against mathematics.
Her classmates didn’t find it funny. Several stopped speaking to her afterwards, apparently holding her personally responsible for enforcing a punishment she hadn’t asked to administer. Her solution, going forward, was to start deliberately answering questions wrong — trading her top-of-the-class status for the ability to stay out of the disciplinary chain entirely.
A different education culture
Corporal punishment remains legal and widely practised in Nigerian schools, and Nigerian boarding schools no less. Stories like Oluwaseyi’s aren’t unusual within that system. Teachers using canes or sticks on students for poor academic performance, and occasionally deputising high-performing students to help enforce it, is a recognisable feature of school culture across much of West Africa and beyond.
It’s a useful reminder that “boarding school” doesn’t describe one universal experience. The word covers everything from under-resourced institutions where physical punishment is standard practice, to the manicured, cane-free campuses most people picture when they hear the term.
Some might think of quiet libraries, ski trips, alumni networks stretching to Ivy League universities and Downing Street. Meanwhile, those who are familiar with Nigerian boarding schools (or other similar institutions) might think something very different.
What “prestigious” actually looks like
That second category is its own world, with its own rules for what makes a school worth the tuition — academic results, low acceptance rates, where its graduates end up, who’s walked its halls before.
Study International has broken down what actually separates the most prestigious boarding schools in the world from the rest, covering the schools known for elite university placement, famous alumni, and facilities that look nothing like a single cane hanging in the corner of a classroom.