But was it abuse, or creative teaching gone wrong? Tim Gilmour, assistant to the director of schools at the Catholic Education Diocese of Wollongong, the group that oversees the school, said in an interview that the experiment started because the class was studying a well-known fictional children’s book, “The Stolen Girl.”

“What’s happened here is that the intention and execution haven’t matched up as well as they might,” he said. “We understand the criticism, and it is certainly the last thing we want to upset the students.”

“This incident reflects an attempt at experiential learning gone horribly wrong,” said Dr. Glenn Savage, a senior lecturer in education policy at the University of Melbourne. At St. Justin’s, both the parents and the school seem to agree that while the lesson was a worthy one, its implementation was questionable. It feeds into a debate, however, on how much control teachers get in the classroom, and how students are taught about the injustices of the past — or the future.

Classrooms across the world, in particular those that have complicated relationships with race and a colonial past, have walked the line between what some see as politicization and others see as education. In 1968, Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher at an all-white school in Iowa, attempted to simulate the impact of the civil rights movement by dividing up her students based on their eye color. The experiment, which came to be known as the blue eyes/brown eyes exercise, became notorious, with teachers abroad also adopting it for their students.

These days, hot topics like climate change, sex and drug education, and even etiquette, have caused friction. In Wellston, Ohio, for example, one New York Times reporter recently examined how a new teacher’s treatment of global warming was met with resistance in a mining town.