the Headmaster's anteroom: punishment you can't tell from conditioning — "they can be described to parents…"

The academy's disciplinary genius is that the body is already the site of both training and punishment, so the two are indistinguishable from the outside. A drill can be "nothing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality," and it looks exactly like conditioning — the drill-sergeant's drop-and-give-me-fifty. The kids name them for what they produce: Pukers, drills whose only job is to hurt you into never repeating whatever you did. The regimen that builds the body is the same machine that can be turned to break it. And the disguise is airtight precisely because it's a body being worked: a Puker is exempt from any "VIII-Amendment protest or sniveling calls home" because it can be logged "as just drills assigned for your overall cardiovascular benefit." Cardiovascular benefit is the alibi that lets the cruelty run "completely sub rosa" — the athletic-conditioning frame launders the sadism.