Boys Being Boys Was Never the Whole Story

My daughter came home a while back and mentioned, almost as an aside, that a boy in her year got pulled up for something he said to a teacher. She didn’t elaborate much, and I didn’t push. But it stuck with me, the way she said it. Not shocked. Just tired.

I’ve been reading the discussion this week about female teachers dealing with Nazi salutes and Epstein jokes in classrooms, and the thread underneath it is a proper snapshot of how this argument always goes. Half the room saying “kids have always been shitheads, this is nothing new.” The other half, mostly people who’ve actually stood in front of a classroom for twenty years, saying no, this is different, and here’s why.

I don’t think both things can’t be true at once. Teenagers have always tested boundaries with dead baby jokes and 9/11 jokes and whatever else was going around. I remember some of it from my own school days, and it wasn’t pretty. But there’s a difference between a kid being edgy because he knows it’s forbidden, and a kid saying something because he genuinely believes it. One teacher in that thread put it well: the old jokes were shock for shock’s sake. The new stuff comes with conviction behind it. That’s the bit that should worry us, not the swearing.

What struck me hardest was the story about the woman finally snapping at a group of boys who’d asked her something obscene in class, and getting suspended for it while the boys walked off basically untouched. That’s not a story about kids being kids. That’s a system that has run out of road, and everyone in it knows it.

I work in IT, not education, so I don’t have to stand in a room with thirty teenagers and absorb whatever they’ve picked up from a group chat the night before. I get to watch this from a distance, which is its own kind of privilege. But I’ve got a daughter in high school, and I’ve had enough conversations with her about what floats around in the group chats to know the algorithm doesn’t care whose kid it’s radicalising. It just wants engagement, and outrage is engagement, and a fifteen-year-old boy feeling aggrieved about something is about as reliable an engagement engine as you’ll find.

The social media ban gets a mention in the comments, and fair enough, because it’s a fairly obvious bit of theatre. Every parent I know who supports it in principle also knows their own kid has a workaround within a week. Banning the platform doesn’t touch the pipeline; it just moves the entry point. The actual problem, the one nobody wants to fund properly, is that we’ve deregulated parenting and deregulated school discipline at the same time, and expected teachers to hold the line with neither tool available to them.

I don’t have a tidy fix. Suspend the kids and you’ve just moved an angry, undereducated teenager onto the street with more time to marinate in the same content. Don’t suspend them and you’ve told every other kid in the room that this is just how things are now. Both of those are bad outcomes, and I notice the thread doesn’t really land on a third option either, because there might not be one that doesn’t cost real money and real institutional will.

What I keep coming back to is the parents. Not all of them, obviously, but enough of them that it shows up in every second story in that thread: the dad who says nothing while his son disrespects his mother, the father who tells a teacher all women with tattoos are sluts, the parents who complain when their son gets a detention for the fortieth Diddy joke instead of asking why he’s still making it. Teachers can’t parent thirty kids for six hours a day and undo what’s happening, or not happening, at home. That was never the deal.

I don’t know what it looks like to fix a culture that’s decided contempt for women is just background noise. I genuinely don’t. But I know it starts smaller than a policy announcement, it starts with a father in a meeting actually flinching when his son mouths off at his mum in front of him. That’s not much. But it’s not nothing either.