Here's another example, which should even more clearly make my point: many teachers I remember from childhood used to give out graded papers in class. They would:

• mention grades and observations out loud in front of the whole class
• praise kids with high grades
• scold kids with bad grades
• give out papers in order, sorted from best grade to worst
• sometimes read out loud from the most ridiculous passages in kids' papers

If you wanted to design a system so as to maximize humiliation (ETA: within the bounds permitted in routine situations, see below), that is pretty much the way you'd go about it.

Now you would not necessarily consciously think to yourself "I'm doing things this way so as to humiliate most kids and encourage social shunning of the few getting top grades". That isn't the kind of things we allow to have running through our minds.

If you had any conscious thoughts about this at all, they might have to do with "holding up the bright kids as examples to the rest" and "giving each their due".

But "the meaning of a message is the response it elicits": even though a teacher's conscious motivations may not include humiliation, if humiliation routinely occurs as a result of their actions we must entertain the hypothesis that it is a fully endorsed outcome of the system.

Now if you take a step back from just "grades", one tiny component of the system, and look at the bigger picture? One thing that quickly becomes apparent is that the system has one adult in charge of twenty to forty kids, and it is in the nature of kids to be unruly. And this is supposed to last for hours on end. So we should not be surprised that the system includes provisions (more than one) whereby the teacher is encouraged to assert their authority over the kids, to somehow "keep them in line".