Professor Reynolds reminisces about the most productive time he spent in school, when he was allowed to just sit and read the encyclopedia. Yup.

I was once suspended from high school for three days.

My crime? Cutting a boring class, and instead going to the public library and reading.

I could never quite understand the rationale of punishing someone for skipping school by...suspending them from school, but that's the mentality of bureaucrats.

Well, actually the education administrators have figured that out. So they instituted a policy much more harsh: ISS. In School Suspension.
They force the kid to stay in a room for the day with only access to school work: lots of it. Regular suspension is ussually reserved for doing things that are kind of criminal, like drug/weapon possession. For excessive cutting and the like its detention and then ISS.

If they suspend the troublemakers, it gives the administraters a time period where they do not have to be dealt with.

It's because the US edu system is only partly about getting a (formal) education. It is also about learning to take orders, be a good follower, playing well with others, and all the other claptrap you need to become a good little US citizen/employee. You may miss a couple days of algebra you'll never use again in adulthood, but you'll learn about the penalties for disobedience and leavin the workplace.

One of the numerous schools I attended (I was difficult, you might say) had the practice of requiring those in detention to copy the dictionary. I got to the 'L' section, IIRC, before that fateful day I was deemed unworthy of continued attendence and cast back into the public school system.

That really showed them! Them being the Conejo Valley Unified School District. It was certainly more of a punishment to that entity than to myself.