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.
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
The damage done when nobody dares say, “this is bollocks.”
Authority in education is broken. It’s not based on understanding, expertise, or results—it’s based on who shouts loudest and wears the right fucking Ted Baker suit. One confident dickhead at the top can derail an entire school. And because no one wants to be seen as “unprofessional”, we let it happen. We’re stuck in a system where people confuse leadership posturing with actual knowledge—and it’s costing us everything.
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.
