Fuck that, you're not teaching them respect or equality. You're teaching them life skills. They're gonna hate it, every second of it. It's gonna fester and boil for years, but eventually they'll realize that it's training them for when they live away from care, that they can in fact take care of themselves, and once that realization comes they'll appreciate their past and all that resentment will float away into the next generation.
It doesn't necessarily teach that, it takes a certain mindset (which should come with age) to be able to appreciate that something you do directly affects someone else. Throwing paper on the ground directly affects those around you because someone has to pick it up, and in the meantime it's something we either step on or around. I wouldn't expect until ~12 years old to understand this, before 14 it's probably thought of as a simple daily chore.
It does teach them to respect the building and equipment, when I went to school I had a teacher who always used the last ten minutes of class daily to make all the kids clean the room (it was a vocational class so lots of messes and things that needed put away) that particular teacher was very well respected too because if you pissed him off he made you hand write an outline of the entire text book.
Yep I learned more from him in two and half years than all the rest of my schooling, sadly he was forced-retired halfway through my senior year and replaced with a total ass who didn't know a capacitor from a solar cell but thought he was the best thing since fire, we ran him off after two weeks!
Oh. Of course. Not right away. It's like please and thank you like our parents teach us when we're tiny beings. It's only.now as an wanna be adult XD that I understand why I should do these things. These kids are probably more mindful about their surroundings and their impact on such than most of us westerner's
Pretty true. Even in Japanese international schools we do this, it's called soji no jikan (time of cleaning). I've always found the concept of school janitors weird o.0 Honestly, this just teaches children life skills of taking care of their belongings and their surroundings. (But maybe a little bit of work skills too bc some elementary school teachers reward the children with candy or something, but middle school and above it just becomes a norm)
American Students: "Oh my like Gawwwd! They treat us like SLAVES!!"