I guess Western Europe isn't part of the West anymore.
Several universities switched from entrance exams to a system of "Everybody gets in, it is the first semester that will probably kill you" :-)
On my first year, the amount of students was 2x the actual capacity. The first semester was very math-heavy, and everyone knew we had the toughest and CS-unrelated subjects delivered up front in order to weed out half of the year.
On the other hand, I have seen a prof. literaly say something along the lines "Dear students, my purpose here is not to teach you anything, just weed out 50% of you"
Corporal punishment was common when the Prussian system was founded (1800s) across the world.
The system provided free education for the lowest rungs of society for the first time in Europe, that's a mighty achievement!
Pedagogically it is a hierarchical system with a strong focus on authority. It doesn't encourage questioning authority outside of the sciences which is a feature for the authoritarian societies deploying this educational model.
With my University diploma I've also got a rank of Lieutenant-reserve of РВСН (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces) so the procedure is metaphorically close :D
What I remember the most was the contrast between the English language textbooks from ~80s vs. the ones I had in school. The modern ones basically exist for both publishers and schools to milk parents. They come in three or four pieces - a book and an exercise book for students, and then an exercise book with answers and some compendium for teachers. That's four books, structured in a way that necessitates attending (and paying for) classes. Meanwhile, the 60s-80s era English books were structured for self-learning. You could work through them with the help of a teacher, or you could do it alone.
(Note that while being self-contained, they've also managed to be smaller. That's because they were free of space fillers. Being set on something one step up from a typewriter limited the amount of bullshit designers could include to zero.)
By the time I was finishing high school in 2007, the regular public school's textbooks for subjects like Polish, math and physics have suffered from the same disease English language books did - they've been split into several pieces, refreshed yearly (ensuring there's almost no second-hand market for them), and structured in such a way you couldn't learn on your own.
I have a few of my grandfather's English books in my basement somewhere; I decided to keep them for my children, so that they have a quality textbook to learn from.