By doing everything for students, we’re teaching them not to give a shit.
Schools talk a big game about aspiration. High flyers. Dream big. Growth mindset. But it’s all bullshit. What they actually train is apathy. Effort is optional. Failure is feared. Ambition is actively discouraged. Not overtly, but structurally. Slowly. Systematically. Kids don’t opt out because they’re lazy (well not always). They opt out because school teaches them that nothing’s worth opting in for.
The Dopamine Dilemma
This is the second post in my series on the collapse of classroom culture. In Part 1, The Erosion of Classroom Civility, I looked at the entitlement, apathy, and aggression now normalised in schools. Here, I want to dig deeper into one of the most toxic forces behind it all: the dopamine economy. Students are chasing short-term highs, scrolling themselves into oblivion, and treating education like background noise. We’re not just competing with social media; we’re losing to it.
Curriculum churn, course swaps, and top-down bullshit are driving talent out the door.
Change is supposed to be progress. But in schools, it’s a never-ending shitshow. A procession of poorly thought-out policies, new faces, new acronyms, and constant disruption. The ground never settles. Teachers are left picking up the pieces while trying to meet targets, keep kids learning, and cling to what’s left of their sanity: “no, no…. I’m fine…I SAID I’M FINE!!!”. The damage isn’t theoretical—it’s fucking everywhere. Burnout, confusion, high turnover, and a profession running on fumes.
The Education System Is Failing Our Young Men
We are watching a generation of boys disengage from school while society and leadership look the other way. From the first days of primary school to the final exam hall of sixth form, boys are underperforming, overlooked and often written off. The system isn’t broken – it’s rigged. It’s bullshit, and everyone knows it. Their decline is measurable, undeniable, and scandalously ignored. While politicians talk smack about ‘levelling up’, the data tells a different story: boys are slipping further behind and barely anyone seems to give a shit.
The Kids Are Not Alright — And We’re Pretending Everything’s Fine
The education system is not equipped to handle algorithmic influence, emotional manipulation, or online radicalisation — and yet we have never needed change more urgently.
We are failing a generation — not by accident, but arguably by choice. While students are being silently shaped, misled and manipulated by an unregulated media machine, the education system is busy patting itself on the back for hitting targets that ultimately, mean fuck all. The world outside the school is a psychological warzone of misinformation, algorithmic bias, and dopamine-driven outrage — and we respond with curriculum grids, box-ticking and ‘thought showers’. We are not preparing kids for reality. We are, unfortunately, complicit in their intellectual disarmament.
Taskmasking and the Collapse of Trust
We are not okay. But we’ve been trained to act like we are (Toxic Resilience). Teachers everywhere are cracking under the pressure, papering over the cracks with a new form of quiet self-harm: taskmasking. Take your impossible workload, cut it into 50 meaningless micro-tasks, tick them off like a good little worker—and no one above notices you’re drowning.
This isn’t resilience. This is bullshit.
Schools are collapsing under the weight of BS bureaucracy, and instead of support, we get scrutiny. Instead of time, we get tasks. No wonder people are quitting. But for those of us still here? We’re keeping the lie alive. We’re breaking ourselves to keep up appearances. And the system, the MATs, the CEOs, fucking love it.
Why Schools Need to Drop the Formal Facade
The over-formalisation of schools has led to a disconnection between students and teachers, stifling genuine relationships and hindering active engagement, giving birth to an apathy epidemic. As students are confronted with the facade of conformity—teachers adorned in business attire, reciting scripted lines, each lesson following the same predictable script as the last—the essence of education becomes obscured by a fog of formality Yet, amidst this barrage of corporate bullshit and rigid systems, lies a yearning for authenticity. There is an imperative to reduce the formality reminiscent of 1920s business conventions and instead promote a more informal approach. This shift fosters genuine connections and restores the social contract between students and teachers.
The Monotonous Rituals of the Post Holder with Too Many Jobs!
In the endless procession of educational routines, there is one in particular that makes both students and teachers wish for assisted death: School assemblies. Indeed, these obligatory gatherings are lacklustre rituals, overseen by disengaged presenters with the delivery skills of a stale digestive and who are about as inspirational as week-old, roadkill. To them, assemblies are merely a task to check off their list. But this isn’t a rant about the mundane; it’s a desperate plea for change because honestly, as Frasier Crane once said: “I’d rather watch a loved one autopsied”.
Breaking the Bullshit Cycle of Overwhelming Workloads
It’s the bullshit that every teacher faces: the overwhelming burden of marking papers, a thankless task that consumes time, energy, and sanity. However, the intolerable excess of this workload exacts a not-so-subtle toll on teachers’ well-being and most worryingly, is perpetuated by those tasked with leading by example.
Ritual insanity
There are so many challenges facing education (urghhh), but this one comes to fuck me over at the same time every year: the cultish ritual of marking mock exams. As teachers, we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of wasted hours, futile efforts, and little to no benefit for our students. It’s an absolute absurdity and honestly, this divine convergence gives me about as much sense of clarity as an angry agnostic at a scientology conference.
