The numbering, grading, and ordering of students conditions them to tacitly accept their hierachical position
In public schools, students are numbered and ordered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. The job of the teacher is to make them accept being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own. If they do the job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else because they have been shown to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline, the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. The result is obedient workforce that can be disciplined and controlled by managers with a minimum amount of hassle. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
In spite of the overall class blueprint that assumes that ninety-nine percent of the kids are in their class to stay, teachers nevertheless make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward. They also frequently insinuate the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though employers are rightly indifferent to such things. The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the heirachy and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic. Failing that, you must stay where you are put.
References
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Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 1. The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher (p. 21). Gabriola Island, CA: New Society Publishers.
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LIbertarian Communist Platform. (2014). Education For Obedience (9:14). Youtube.