I got yelled at by a teacher for this in the '90s. I used the command line to access things that weren't presented in the login shell's menu. Since the system had permissions which explicitly granted me the right to access other programs I didn't think anything of it... but he thought differently and accused me of hacking.
We had a similar outbreak of NETSEND at my high school. A couple of kids were suspended (for sending bad things) but the chorus of kids explaining how easy it was to send anonymous messages to the entire school caused them to actually secure the computers.
seems like knowledge is what's being hammered on these days by propaganda. IIRC a kid was arrested for using DOS / a shell on his school computer (can't find the link, sorry)