Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

by Camilla Townsend

When a student at a calmecac, as the schools were called, committed a particularly serious infraction, such as drinking, he was doomed to participate in a ceremony in which the priests attempted to drown him—or seemed to attempt to do so. “They plunged him under the water and dragged him. They went pulling him along by the hair. They kicked him. As he swam under the water, churning, beating, and swirling it up as he went, he escaped the hands of the priests…. When he finally reached the shore, he lay half dead, breathing his last, gasping in his last agonies.” At that point the boy’s parents were allowed to take him home. The system was not without a certain moral impurity. If a mother and father were convinced that their child was not a good swimmer and thus might actually die, they could bribe the school officials. “They would give the priests a turkey or some other kind of food, so that they would let [their boy] be.”65