In Defence of Students

We Need to Protect Our Students from Us

In discussions about education I am, and will always be, on the side of students.

There’s a nasty vein running through the educational community, and it sounds something like this: ‘Is it just me, or is classroom behaviour getting worse?’; ‘How can I teach if my students can’t pay attention for more than a minute?’; “Students are functionally illiterate.”; yadda yadda yadda. With articles heralding the end of humanity to TikTok clips of teachers condemning their students with virtuous conviction - whether born from pity, frustration, concern, or distain - our youth are collectively carrying the emotional weight of our digital ire.

I’ll be the first person to announce that we have an education crisis, and that we also have a crisis in our youth, but I will not point the finger at them for their shortcomings. They’re the consequences of the ecosystems they were born into.

‘Zombie Generation’, ‘Snowflakes’, ‘Screenagers’, ‘NPCs’, ‘Woketards’, ‘Slacktivists’, ‘The Helpless Generation’ …

We taught our kids non-violent communication in school and then label them with hurtful words for not behaving the way we want them to (I know this because I received the professional training and delivered it in my classrooms). And even if we don’t use the slurs, there’s a pervasive attitude of hand-wringing over the perceived shortcomings of our students. If there’s one thing I know for certain, although you may think they’ve tuned out, this generation hears every word of it and feels it more deeply that older generations. I find the whole business of this public shaming vile, lacking in grace, respect, and love.

Owning the Blame

As educators, we must take responsibility for the learning of our students; and if there are those who don’t have the humility or stamina to fight in the trenches in unwavering defence of students then perhaps it’s better they move on. This is a battle for our future.

I have little patience for pettiness and half-heartedness, speaking with composed concern from one side of the mouth while cutting accusations dribble from the other; I expect educators to hold the line. I’m not talking about exhausting yourselves with the often banal professional obligations that have come to fill our time, I’m talking about the strength of character to live with the bold-faced conviction that our mission is to protect and empower our students. Teachers should shoulder responsibility not because we’re solely to blame, but because that’s the ethical mandate of our vocation.

Teachers must live exemplary lives, so as to inspire by lived example - not swept away by the undercurrents of commonplace indulgences and petty grievances. There’s been a collapse of integrity amongst our political leaders, priests, advocates for justice, and educators¹. We’ve come to perform these roles as jobs - occupations to do rather than examples to become. Many educators have, perhaps unwittingly, become credentialed authoritarians - seeking reverence for their position rather than for the substance of their character or the integrity of their example. The role of the teacher is to inspire learning. Knowledge - the internalisation of information through perception, experience, and context - can’t be ‘transferred’.

Digital Natives in an Analogue World

Millennials were the first generation to be born into digital soil. While we may grieve the loss of analogue sensitivities, it would be naïve to imagine that, barring a global catastrophe, there will be a return to life before screens and AI. Instead, the trend will be towards more and greater technological transformations - persistent provocations that challenge the way we live and understand humanity. The velocity and scale of technological change today is without historical precedent, and yet we continue to consider our youth as the same as us. Their cognitive and cultural environment has shifted so dramatically that they may as well belong to a different branch of human experience - but we’re too close to see this.

I grew up in an analogue world. In that world, when things didn’t work, we hit them: Telephone doesn’t work…bang the receiver against the table. TV doesn’t work…whack the side of the box. Car doesn’t work…hit the solenoid with a hammer. Student doesn’t work…. When the option for physical violence was removed from schools, emotional violence often took its place.

We’ve now managed to remove physical and overt emotional abuse from schools, which should be celebrated, but they no longer possess the tools to enforce conformity. Employing tools of systematic manipulation, we’ve indoctrinated by burdening with work, sleep deprivation, nutrition deprivation, and highly controlled environments - and then become frustrated when students still find ways to resist through disengagement and absenteeism. Let’s recognise these behaviours for what they are - coping mechanisms (Cheng et al., 2020; Skinner & Pitzer, 2012; Kearney, 2008)². We’ve removed fight and flight from the menu and all students have left is freeze and fawn. Such tactics are systematic attacks on autonomy, critical thought, and self-trust - replacing them with dependency, obedience, and fear. Our methods betray our purpose - we need to pivot from coercion to inspiration.

Sensitivity for Capability

Unlike analogue devices, our digital youth are more like smartphones. I believe their potential is levels of magnitude greater but we’ve sacrificed durability for capability. If you drop a digital device it will fracture and break, but do you look at your smartphone and think, ‘If only I could go back to having an analogue telephone?’ And yet, we treat our youth as analogue humans, noticing their frailty but not their capabilities. We can’t see past our own mental models to understand that we’re not the same - the change happened too quickly.

The capabilities of our young don’t interface well with the structures of earlier generations, nor should they - evolution is a one-way street. We don’t look at ourselves and think, ‘If only we still had club-like hands so I can walk on my knuckles.’ Our hands are now far less rugged than in the past, but profoundly more sensitive and capable. Our youth got a firmware update but they’re being forced to function with the same old hardware and drivers.

We should be considering our students through the lens of an anthropologist³; like Bronisław Malinowski investigating distant tribes in the spirit of curiosity and the pursuit of understanding. We need to meet students where they’re at, building our practices around them rather than trying to immerse them into the mores of the past. This is the most basic and obvious pedagogical starting place, but it’s not happening.

Meeting Students Where They’re At

Governments, educational institutions, and teachers need to find the courage to transform. It’s clear that what has worked in the past is no longer working. Read the room! Is it not evident by the lack of engagement, the glazed eyes, perpetual bathroom breaks, absenteeism, breakdowns, panic attacks, and unsubmitted work that schools have lost their agency? Does the relentless inflation of grades⁴ not indicate that we’re forcing the material of our youth into an extruder that no longer functions? Rather than thinking of this as a ‘them problem’ we need to recognise that this is an ‘us problem’ - we’re the dinosaurs.

In my experience, my students have been consistently capable, intelligent, sensitive, caring, respectful, and relational. When I consider my own cognitive abilities, at their age I would now be thought of as slow, clueless, and immature. Our problem isn’t that our students aren’t capable, it’s that they need different conditions to learn. We’re trying to extol the virtues of gramophones in an era of digital streaming. Yes, teachers are trying very hard to make their curricula effective, but that is a topical solution to a systemic problem. Convincing our students that our classes are engaging is like trying to sell The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as an action flick to a generation of kids who grew up on The Avengers. The solution is a complete rebuild - but we’re still trying to put lipstick on a pig.

The Human Scale

To engage students in their context we need to begin with relationship. Relationship is the wireless connectability of learning; if the devices don’t pair, then streaming isn’t possible. If we are serious about meaningful learning, then classroom sizes must be smaller - 12 is ideal, 18 is absolutely max. (but already too large in my opinion). By changing this, many teaching and student problems would melt away. I can already hear the chorus of people waiting to tell me this is impossible. Whatever. Jesus could manage 12 - one dropped the course and was replaced by a student on the waiting list. Twelve can be intimate and the teacher can hold more sway than the cohort. If we’re serious about learning then we need to find a way to fix this. It’s time for the mass-production model of education to be retired.

Classrooms need to be practical. Students should come to school to work, not to listen. If we want student engagement then we need to engage our students in meaningful and relevant activities; that means creating, problem-solving, exploring, and discussing things that matter to them. I would go so far as to say that, as a rule, in a 90 minute class the teacher shouldn’t be lecturing for more than 10 minutes. There are exceptions where a lecture format is appropriate, but this should not be the norm.

Also, ditch the homework. Under which authoritarian regime did we determine that teachers have the right to programme our students’ lives beyond the 7-9 hours that they already spend in school each day? One of the most common complaints from my students is, “School tells us to chase our dreams and then gives us so much work that we either don’t have time, or are too tired to do so.”⁵ Learning is a digestive process and needs to be desired. If you’re always full then you have no appetite. Or, to borrow a culinary expression, “Hunger is the best sauce!”

Screens & Machines

Until we take responsibility for our inaction, and recognise the damage that it’s causing our students, we have no authority to criticise our youth for their coping dispositions. Let’s shelf the ‘screens are destroying our children’ accusations until we’ve done all we can to meet students where they’re at - building our pedagogies around their ways of being. Certainly, phones should not be in the classroom unless they’re being employed by teachers. Having phones in the classroom is like conducting an AA meeting in a bar. But this is only a symptom of the fact that, in a mass education model, classrooms have become pedestrian, utilitarian spaces. Classroom must become sacred spaces once again.

AI will become a foundational technology in our societies and we have a responsibility as educators to prepare our students for the future⁶. In schools, some classrooms must be AI free while others must become AI dependent. We can’t allow students to obtain functional proficiency at the expense of internal proficiency. If students never internalise foundational skills, they’ll struggle with higher-order thinking, problem-solving, and adaptability throughout their lives. However, if they use AI after acquiring foundational skills, they can leverage the technology as amplifiers rather than substitutes.

Stop Tinkering. Start Building.

I’ve previously discussed the idea of a 'sandbox for innovation' in every school; a classroom which doesn’t have to follow the rules so that there’s space for innovation inside of the system. In this way, schools have a mechanism for iterative evolution and a place to unleash the creative potential of teachers in a constructive way. If schools don't have a built-in capacity for change, then they risk becoming stagnant and inbred.

I’m an enthusiastic supporter of creating independent laboratories for educational innovation - streamlined miniature versions of schools, populated with small cohorts of students, who are partners in the investigation of solutions for schools. In these laboratories we challenge all assumptions, build from first principles, employ the most current science of learning, trial bleeding edge technologies, and turn methodologies on their head. Such organisations would rapidly model innovative practices and feed them back to schools as ready-baked strategies.

Change must be radical but wise, rapid but very careful; we’re working with the material of lives, careers, and communities. We can’t afford to get this wrong, but we also can't afford to continue as we have - more dramatic change is coming and we need to have systems in place to cope with the impact of technological transformations. I am committed to being part of that work. For those with the means and vision to help build something new, my door is open. We’ve spent too long preserving the architecture of a system built for another age; it’s time to prototype the future.

Break It to Fix It

There has never been a more urgent need to act. Our children are navigating unprecedented pressures, and our tools have evolved beyond our capacity to wield them wisely; incremental reform will not suffice. As educators, we need to rally around our students; shielding them from condemnation, understanding their needs, preparing them for uncertainty, and empowering them to make the changes that we were unable to. We should allow educational institutions to break so that our students do not - rebuilding them for a new purpose, for a new people, and for a future we can’t perceive.

1. Edelman. (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust and the Crisis of Grievance. Edelman Data & Intelligence. https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer

2. Cheng, H., Furnham, A., & Hu, Z. (2020). The relationship between academic stress, coping strategies, self-efficacy, and engagement among university students. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 841. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00841

Kearney, C. A. (2008). School absenteeism and school refusal behavior in youth: A contemporary review. Clinical Psychology Review, 28(3), 451-471. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2007.07.012

Skinner, E. A., & Pitzer, J. R. (2012). Developmental dynamics of student engagement, coping, and everyday resilience. In S. L. Christenson, A. L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.), Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 21-44). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7_2

3. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Saxon House.

4. Gewertz, C. (2022, May 19). Pace of grade inflation picked up during the pandemic, study says. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/pace-of-grade-inflation-picked-up-during-the-pandemic-study-says/2022/05

5. Galloway, M. K., Conner, J., & Pope, D. (2013). Nonacademic effects of homework in privileged, high-performing high schools. The Journal of Experimental Education, 81(4), 490–510. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2012.745469

6. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. (2021). Final report. U.S. Government Publishing Office. https://reports.nscai.gov/final-report/introduction

Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Penguin.