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.
Comfort, Compliance and the Cult of Fragility
School used to be where you learned to cope with difficulty. Now it’s where you learn to avoid it. We’ve built a system that rewards fragility, punishes independence, and medicalises effort. Resilience isn’t something we teach—it’s something we fucking sideline. And no one is talking about the long-term cost of raising a generation that can’t cope with being uncomfortable.
Reclaiming the Classroom
This is the final part of my series on student behaviour. In Part 1, I tackled the breakdown of basic civility: the rudeness, the refusal, the fucking cheek. In Part 2, I broke down the dopamine nightmare—the tech-fuelled, attention-sapping, overstimulated disaster we’re now expected to teach through.
Now it’s time to fight back. This post is about what we can do—because while we’re not responsible for fixing everything, we sure as shit don’t have to lie down and take it. Reclaiming the classroom isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being intentional. Strategic. Defiant.
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.
The Erosion of Classroom Civility
The classroom, once a space of basic cooperation—however reluctant—has become loaded with hostility, apathy, and arrogance. The respect has gone. Kids walk in late, with no pen, no folder, no clue what day it is, and expect to be entertained. If you challenge it, you get attitude: “Why are you shouting at me?” or “What’s your problem?” The concept of effort is alien. The idea of consequence? Hilarious. School is no longer a space for learning; it’s an inconvenience in their dopamine-chasing day
Why Modern Lessons Are Designed to Distract
Lessons are no longer about learning. They’re about ticking boxes. Students get dragged through pointless routines. Teachers are forced to follow a format that kills thought. Every lesson looks busy on the surface, but underneath, nothing’s happening.
This isn’t just bad practice—it’s a failure of fucking purpose. Schools have been redesigned to control attention, not to build understanding. As Psychology Today puts it, we’re in an attention economy now—and students are the ones being harvested. Learning isn’t the goal. Looking like learning is.
The Endless Cycle of Incomplete Ideas and Social Media Echo Chambers
Leadership is addicted to fads. Not thoughtful, evidence-based reform—just whatever half-baked buzzword happens to be trending. They pull shallow ideas from books they barely read, twist them into top-down mandates, and dump them on staff like scripture. No debate. No doubt. No clue. The result is confused classrooms, fractured staffrooms, and a profession that’s running on fumes while leadership cosplays as innovators.
What TikTok Is Doing to Education
We’ve normalised dysfunction. Cinemas are shutting down screenings because teenagers are acting out TikTok trends during Minecraft: The Movie. They’re not just loud — they’re organised. Filming each other, throwing things, chanting catchphrases for views. It’s not quirky, it’s not harmless, and it’s not going away. This is what happens when attention becomes currency, and social media is the mint. Schools are dealing with the fallout daily. Behaviour is deteriorating, empathy is collapsing, and nobody in power seems willing to admit what’s happening. Social media isn’t just a distraction. It’s behavioural sabotage at scale — and we’re being fucked over by it every single day.
How Education Is Undermining Critical Thinking
Education was supposed to sharpen minds, not blunt them. It seems schools are little more than factories, churning out obedient workers rather than independent thinkers. Instead of setting off fires of curiosity, we smother them with compliance and conformity. It’s not just a system that’s broken — it’s a system that’s actively hostile to real thought. We’ve traded thinking for ticking, and every day we perpetuate this bullshit, we’re complicit.
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.
