“Sanction” can mean to approve or to punish. The same rules feel very different depending on which side you’re on.

The same rule reads as protection from one side and punishment from the other, and the word for it has always meant both. Curfews, no phone policies, substitution rules, a dress code. Whoever wrote it was usually solving a problem you cannot see from where you are standing, and whoever is living under it is feeling something the writer never had to feel. Both views are accurate and incomplete.

Take the rule that annoys you most. Work out what it is trying to prevent, then say the real objection to whoever set it rather than to your friends.