While Stephen Graham’s new drama ‘Adolescence’ may exaggerate the links between knife crime and the digital manosphere, as well as the presence of violent misogyny in white working-class boys, it does paint an accurate picture of modern schools.
The second episode of the limited series shows a school wrestling with the aftermath of the murder of one student by another student, following the detectives as they navigate from classroom to classroom asking for help in their investigation. What becomes obvious is that the school community is not coping. There is no solemnity over the death of their classmate with students making crude jokes, gleeful in the spectacle of police being on campus. Additionally, there is no protection over those close to the victim or murderer as they face bullying or lash out violently at others.
What is also obvious is that the school has a level of complicity in the tragedy, particularly in its role as a moral vacuum created by ambivalent educators and parents.
This is the case in many schools across Australia, the UK, and America today.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes, and what comes to rule is the law of the jungle with bullies taking charge. ‘Does it look like anyone is learning anything in there?’ the lead detective comments. ‘It’s a f-ing holding pen, videos in every class.’
The digital manosphere is only a small part of the real crisis affecting our schools. Sometimes this crisis has been described as the youth mental health crisis, because it has been primarily understood in psychological terms. But it would more accurately be called the meaning crisis, where young men do not know true masculinity, where young women do not know true femininity, and widespread mental illness is rapidly becoming the norm.
The mental health of adolescents is never far from the forefront of a secondary teacher’s mind. I learned this early in my teaching career, on the second day of my teaching placement at a school in Victoria’s eastern outer suburbs. While I was struggling to get a Year 9 class to read Macbeth, an alarm sounded and we were put into lockdown. Doors were locked, blinds pulled down, and students and staff were instructed to stay inside. Of course, questions fly through your mind: is there an intruder on the school grounds, a school shooter, a disgruntled parent, or has there been a brawl between students? The reason my school had been locked down was because a 14-year-old girl had intentionally thrown herself off the second floor of the school building. She survived the attempt, thank God, and an ambulance took her away to treat her injuries. There was a staff briefing later on that day to address what had happened and counselling was offered – but overall school went on as normal that week. Much like in Adolescence the students told crude jokes or were apathetic. Amongst the staff there lingered on a dread that silenced any further mention of it, as if bringing it up would bring bad omens or copycat attempts. Evidently, it had not been the first mental health incident at that school and was unlikely to be the last. This, the school seemed to say, was the way things are.
This anecdote, while a tragedy in its own right, is part of a larger trend of declining mental stability within our schools. The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on youth mental health report, published earlier this year, was the culmination of four years of work confirming this decline in youth mental health and the lack of support for children and teenagers suffering from mental illness in Australia. This report consulted 50 leading figures in mental health research, with lead author Professor Patrick McGorry writing, ‘Over the last 15 to 20 years, we’ve seen an alarming rise, a 50 per cent increase in the need for care in this age group.’
Additionally, a 2022 report from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) also showed that youth depression, anxiety, and suicide rates have been rising since the 1990s, predictably this trend has been followed with a sharp rise in the prescription of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs for adolescents. The prescriptions of drugs, such as SSRIs and benzodiazepines, have also become more ubiquitous within the school environment and in the medical world, with the majority of antidepressants now prescribed by GPs rather than paediatricians or psychiatrists. Indeed, this last point has prompted the TGA to recommend more stringent rules concerning the prescriptions of antidepressants by GPs.
Clearly, this is a complex issue with many moving parts. However, the question of what role schools should take in addressing this crisis is clearly important.
Schools are the main social hub for children, they represent the first community entered other than the family children are born into. It is also worth noting that schools are increasingly taking on more and more of a parental role as parents spend longer hours at work. It should first be asserted that teachers need not be expected to be dabbling psychologists, managing to teach numeracy and literacy while also diagnosing and treating mental illness. At the same time, however, we cannot let schools off the hook entirely, a wayward or ill community is bound to cause mental disturbance even in well-adjusted children. In this, we can appeal to a classical ideal captured in the Ancient Greek term, paideia. The word paideia referred to both culture and education at once. It was a process that did not prescribe standing back to let a child ‘naturally’ bloom, but aimed to form well-rounded citizens that would be of service to the community in more than just economic terms.
But could a better paideia, a better-suited community or culture, have stopped that teenage girl from jumping off our school building? I am not sure. What I can confidently argue, however, is that within a better culture she would be less likely to see life as irredeemable and hence less likely to commit such an action, and that in the aftermath of such an event a community would be able to better reckon with what had occurred. Indeed, with such a culture our nation would be better able to cope with what is happening all over Australia and prevent the need to over-medicate or have every second child in therapy. The implicit worldview we impart to the young in schools today is failing them.
As teachers and parents we are mostly unaware we are imparting a soulless worldview. I once witnessed a counsellor inadvertently do this while talking to a particularly anxious cohort about the scientific reasons behind anxiety – thinking this would comfort them, a move characteristic of the domineering approach of modern schooling. She briefly recapped how evolution works, i.e. the death of inferior members of a species and continuation of favourable traits in offspring, and continued on by pointing out that their anxieties about school were left-over adaptations from the cavemen era, no longer relevant to our current environment. As she concluded the talk, they evidently were not comforted but looked confused and worried. For rather than bestowing mastery and control, the idols of Enlightenment philosophy, she had rendered their anxiety as arbitrary and pointless, significant only in marking them as inferior members of the species destined to die out. ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ as the saying goes. Our current cultural zeitgeist, characterised by materialism and hedonism, concludes that suffering ultimately has no meaning or dignity.
This impoverished worldview is especially insidious because it can camouflage itself against genuinely noble principles while simultaneously subverting them. I witnessed this in a recent conversation with a class of 16-year-olds about their future ambitions and what they saw as the purpose of their lives. One student declared proudly they wanted to spend their life helping animals, a seemingly noble goal but when asked why she responded, ‘Because it makes me feel good.’ I followed up by asking if it would still be a good way to spend your life even if it did not make her feel good, she said no. And then we explored a hypothetical of how she would spend her life if hurting animals made her feel good. While initially resistant due to being the sort of person who enjoys helping animals, she eventually admitted through some Socratic questioning that hurting animals would be a good way to spend a life if it felt good. That is, as long as it was socially acceptable to torture animals, after all no one wants to get cancelled on social media.
Modern education is constantly teaching children to prop up dead virtues, and wave limp hands to parents and teachers like a scene from A Weekend at Bernie’s. Virtue has not been exiled from schools as some conservatives claim, but merely sidelined as one way among others of having fun and being happy. This frequently happens through the relativisation of virtues, as John Ruskin observed of the degeneration of humility in his age: ‘We regard it as a relative quality. We humble ourselves to this one and that, bow to the prince and lord it over the peasant.’ In schools this relativising often occurs through the exchange of virtues for values. Values are relativist and self-created, whereas a virtue must be discovered and conformed to. As Iain Benson, Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Sydney, writes:
In a values framework, those who think they are standing up for something like ‘family values’ are actually squatting. The hopeful person at a school board meeting who thinks he or she is communicating something true when they speak of ‘Christian values’ is mistaken. In the current climate, such an expression ends up sounding like this: ‘I speak of the values that a Christian like me holds.’ Yawn. Next speaker please.
Moral relativism appears inviting at first, promising freedom from the strictures of the absolute, but is a poison for developing a healthy self-image, a sense of community, and sense of purpose. The modern self is asserted to have endless potential, but where one can imagine oneself as endlessly changeable, one also imagines oneself as utterly ephemeral and ultimately the result of an arbitrary sequence of biological and atomic events. The self-image implicitly promoted to most students is little more than of a suffering jumped-up ape, whose only advantage over other animals is an awareness of its own misery. An aimlessness pervades which gives no defence against addictive indulgences in substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, gambling) and ideological abuse (Woke-ism, radical feminism, Andrew Tate idolatry). Even in the well-adjusted individual we find the modern self is ever intoxicated by cycles of fashion and technological distraction. Many children learn how to self-brand on Instagram before they have a proper sense of self.
Contributing to this malaise, as detailed by researchers like Judith Locke and Jonathan Haidt, are excessively over-protective parents. These parents have pressured school leaders to then in turn over-manage their teachers into over-teaching and coddling the students. In a previous high-performing school I taught in, it became an everyday occurrence to have students running from classrooms in tears and this is occurring despite being pumped with copious amounts of anti-anxiety drugs. Mental fragility and overbearing parenting has created a phenomenon in which the teacher is continually lowering expectations to prevent the self-worth of students from shattering and dealing with complaints from parents and administrators. The sheltering from all adversity and disappointment, as has been well observed by psychologists, only increases anxiety in the long run. Hence a vicious feedback loop emerges in which both academic standards and mental stability fall together in a death spiral.
This also extends to a denial of disadvantage, observed through vocabulary shifts. Disabled has become ‘differently-abled’, special education has become specific education, and neurological disorders are classified under the term neurodiverse. Under these revisions, the word normal has become a slur and replaced by ‘neurotypical’. The change being pushed for here is far more revolutionary than simply asserting the dignity of individuals despite their disabilities. For now, we must pretend these disorders are not detrimental and merely different. In response many autistic individuals with a more realistic view of their disorder have called for a push-back against this movement due to fears it is hampering attempts to cure or lessen the effects of autism which many neurodiversity advocates see as a tantamount to genocide. As ludicrous as the neurodivergence movement is, there is seemingly no other valid alternative for progressives in recognising the dignity of disadvantaged children other than denying that disadvantage exists. No alternative exists because under a materialist and utilitarian worldview there is no dignity intrinsic to the homo sapien. Darwinism has no intrinsic dignity for them, neither does Marxism nor Woke politics. The conformed child under a tyrannical teacher obviously has no dignity but neither does the pandered child of a student-centred classroom who has power but no dignity. Pandered students eventually cotton on that they are untested according to any real criterion and that sense of power is soon gnawed by doubts, needing to be satisfied by greater demands.
A look back for a way forward
For the sake of our children’s mental stability what is needed are schools equipped to give them a stable sense of self-worth. As we have established, dignity cannot be rescued when worldly success is all that matters nor can dignity be found under the intoxication of pandering and coddling. The question we must ask is – where is human dignity to be found and how can we point adolescents towards it? In the first place it is crucial to strip away the fantasies haunting our modern ideas of human nature and re-examine ourselves in the light of tried-and-true wisdom. To begin we must discard Rousseau’s idea that all are born naturally benevolent and are corrupted by society. Through this we can welcome back imperfection from its exile. As Daniel Buck, author of What is wrong with our schools? writes:
Ultimately, Rousseau’s idealistic view of humanity is suspect. Be it Christian conception of original sin, Thomas Hobbes’ declaration that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ or simple scepticism of the faculties of a mind developed through the mindless process of natural selection, most philosophies agree there is something rotten in the state of man. Even if we could somehow craft a perfect system, middle school boys would still pick fights and conversations would still get catty or cruel.
As a point of comparison we can look to where a renewal of this intrinsic dignity and its requisite anthropology is taking place, namely in the rise of strict Michaela-style schools in the UK and the classical education revival in the United States. Like the ideal of paideia, classical education’s ultimate aim is forming well-rounded adults. The most comprehensive research which demonstrates this is the University of Notre Dame’s Good Soil Report – ‘a 2018-19 comparative study of alumni from public, secular private, Catholic, evangelical Christian, religious homeschool, and ACCS (classical Christian) schools, on topics of life-choices, preparation, attitudes, values, opinions, and faith practices.’ The report is well worth reading in full but I will highlight a few of the advantages of a classical education. In comparison to graduates from other school sectors, classical Christian school graduates had a significantly more positive outlook on life, felt far more ready for tertiary education and life beyond secondary school, achieved higher tertiary degrees, scored higher in reading, participated more in community service initiatives and were more likely to retain their faith as adults. What these reports show above all is that classical education is not a grandiose dream but a genuine and effective way forward for schools.
For a glimpse down the path we are currently on, as schools shed Western traditions and the stable anthropology bestowed by them, we can look to what Yuval Harari wrote in his best-selling book Sapiens:
Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
It is a striking vision but unoriginal. Huxley already envisioned a near identical future in Brave New World, where an unreal happiness is guaranteed not by SSRIs, Prozac, and Oxycontin but by a fictional drug called Soma. Thus, even if classical education stands as a hypothetical future for the moment, it is a hope far more real than the distorted reality experienced today by many of our adolescents perplexed by the intoxicants they are exposed to at school, whether pharmaceutical or ideological.
Conor Ross is a Melbourne-based secondary school teacher.
