I think there are important distinctions. They're important for a couple of reasons. For one, it's just not right to discard other people's experience. Ppl who did time in one place and time when the atmosphere wasn't quite so manic shouldn't discard other people's perceptions, who may have spent the majority of their time on the floor or in a timeout room hurting from serious untreated injuries. And the other way around.
If we can't discuss the differences w/o a brawl then we can't understand the similarities either.
And there's a lot to be learned from the both the similarities and the differences.
If you're going to try and prove out that the people who ran the program did it all for the money (for example) you'd miss the mark and those greedy money motivated evil people would never be recognized. Demonization is not just dangerous to the scapegoat, it's dangerous to the potential victims who become illeducated about what to look out for.
That every generation of Program founders thought they were improving on the plan is an important fact. If you don't understand how that works, why you might, in good concinece, advise someone to ship their kid off to a place like Whitmore Academy or ALA or Kid Peace, believing that they're entirely different from Straight or The Seed or Kids or whatever. That would be a really big error in judgement.
Religion is just mind control.
--George Carlin, comedian