Everyone points fingers, especially at teachers. Meanwhile, kids (and now adults) learn that nothing is ever their fault.
Education is drowning in blame. When grades drop, teachers are blamed. When behaviour spirals, it’s pinned on staff. If there’s a mental-health crisis, guess who takes the hit. Kids watch this circus unfold and learn the one skill that seems to matter: deflect, deny, repeat.
No, students don’t get a vote.
Somewhere along the line, we started treating classrooms like town fucking halls. Rules became suggestions. Sanctions became “conversations.” Teachers were told to listen more, say less, and act like facilitators rather than leaders. And now we see the rusults: Total fucking chaos. Kids don’t need a peer, they need a boundary. A classroom is not a democracy. It’s a learning environment, and the adult is in charge. So step the fuck up and act like a fucking adult!
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
How Image Obsession is Warping Girls’ Self-Worth and School Culture
It’s a tough subject, but I’m going to say it: girls in schools are spending more time on their appearance than their education. Fake lashes, full makeup, skirts rolled , TikTok poses at break. It’s not “just a phase”—it’s a full shift in values. Where boys have turned to toxic male influencers as a model for behaviour, girls are copying shallow, appearance-focused ones. Looks now carry more weight than effort. Schools are avoiding the issue for fear of backlash. Meanwhile, girls are being shaped by an attention economy built on insecurity.
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.
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.
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.
