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
This is the first in a three-part series. In The Dopamine Dilemma, I’ll explore how social media has wrecked attention spans, fried motivation, and turned classrooms into distraction zones. In Reclaiming the Classroom, I’ll lay out what the hell we can actually do about it. But first, let’s deal with the sheer lack of basic civility that’s killing the profession.
Problem
We’re being mugged off daily. Kids turn up with nothing, expect everything, and lose their shit the second they’re asked to take basic responsibility. No book? Your fault. Didn’t do the homework? You didn’t explain it right. Disrupting the class? You’re picking on them. This isn’t one or two outliers; it’s a pattern. Effort is seen as optional. Rules are offensive. Teachers are expected to tolerate open defiance, walk on eggshells, and just “understand” why 14-year-olds can’t be arsed to bring a fucking pen.
Causes
Social media has melted their brains. TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube—every platform they live on is engineered for speed, outrage, and instant reward. Attention spans are shattered; boredom is unbearable. So when a teacher expects them to sit, think, or push through discomfort, that doesn’t compute. Lanier wasn’t wrong: tech companies have hijacked attention for profit, and we’re the poor bastards trying to run a curriculum through that neurological wreckage.
Add to that a culture obsessed with individual validation. Every kid is told to “be themselves” without any sense of shared expectations. No one teaches them that society—even a classroom—requires compromise. Richard Shotton would call it behavioural contagion: if defiance is visible, it spreads. If no one brings a pen and gets away with it, why the fuck would anyone else bother?
Parents don’t help. Challenge a kid and you’re lucky if you don’t get an angry email by the end of the day. “My child felt uncomfortable.” “They didn’t understand the tone you used.” Fuck off. Schools are so afraid of complaints they bend over backwards to avoid conflict; in doing so, they give up authority entirely. Staff stop enforcing rules because they know they’ll be the ones dragged into a bullshit meeting with SLT while the kid sits smirking outside.
Authority itself has been gutted. The profession’s been ripped apart by media hit jobs, political scapegoating, and leadership obsessed with pleasing inspectors over backing staff. Kids don’t respect teachers because there’s no reason to. They know we’re not allowed to do anything. They know we’ll be the ones in trouble if we say the wrong thing. So they push, and they win.
And let’s be honest: school just feels irrelevant to them. It doesn’t deliver the buzz they get online. It doesn’t boost their status. It doesn’t give them followers, likes, or drama. Berger’s idea of social currency hits hard here—if something doesn’t make you look good or feel seen, it’s discarded. Schools can’t compete with the rush they get from a 15-second reel. It’s too slow, too quiet, too demanding.
Then there’s the mental health collapse. The Sky News report slaps hard: the UK ranks 27th out of 36 for child mental wellbeing. Life satisfaction for UK teens is in the toilet, especially for girls. And when kids are unhappy, anxious, and overstimulated, they lash out—not just physically, but through attitude, defiance, and a complete disconnection from empathy. This is the fallout we’re teaching through.
Effects
The job feels fucking impossible. Staff feel disrespected, demoralised, and trapped in a cycle of behaviour firefighting instead of actual teaching. Good teachers leave; new teachers burn out. The ones left behind end up internalising the chaos. Lessons become survival exercises. Students who do want to learn get drowned out by noise. Expectations are lowered to keep the peace. And in the middle of it all, we pretend this is fine. It’s not. It’s a slow-motion collapse, and we’re just watching it happen.
Solutions
First, we stop tolerating bullshit. That means staff backing each other and leadership backing staff. A kid’s “bad day” doesn’t mean they get a free pass to be a dickhead to adults. Expectations need to be simple, clear, and enforced without apology. Bring a fucking pen. Sit the fuck down. Do the fucking task. No trauma-informed jargon is going to work if we can’t even agree on the basics. Leadership needs to stop gaslighting staff with toxic positivity and get real: if you don’t have the balls to support your staff when they challenge behaviour, then you are part of the fucking problem. CPD should be grounded in real strategies—de-escalation, consistency, boundaries—not fluffy nonsense about “emotional journeys.” And we need to start telling the public the truth: kids are not OK, and pretending they are while flogging attendance drives and curriculum fads is just bullshit on top of bullshit.
Conclusion
This isn’t just a discipline issue; it’s a cultural collapse playing out in our corridors. If this post hits a nerve, wait for part two: The Dopamine Dilemma, where I’ll go deeper into how the attention economy is hijacking students’ ability to think, feel, and fucking function. After that, Reclaiming the Classroom will lay out what we can do—because even if the system’s broken, we’re not done fighting.
