The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media has made it easier for pupils to connect, parents to panic.
For the uninitiated, a TikTok trend thought to have begun in Hackney last month has seen posts pop up across the country – from Nottingham to Watford – encouraging children to meet for clashes between different schools organised into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ teams. Locations are provided; the Hackney branch of McDonald’s, for example, was deemed a suitable Colosseum. Different points are offered for different hits – ten points for a hit, 20 for filming it – and some posts call for weapons, from combs and protractors up to knives.
As the trend spread, parents became terrified. The Met Police posted hundreds of officers to schools. Parents were told to check their children’s phones. Teachers at St Dunstan’s College in Catford – one of the schools named in the posts – escorted pupils home; another school in Merton wouldn’t let a dozen pupils come in for their own safety. Other schools told pupils they would be expelled if seen at locations named in the posts.
The truth behind the ‘school wars’ seems to be that several pupils shared a series of graphics they found quite amusing which – when discovered by parents – were then blown out of all proportion. While the adults fretted, actual violence in schools was neglected. In Nottingham, a 15-year-old boy was stabbed and hospitalised in an attack believed to be unrelated to any TikTok post. Asking how that was allowed to happen, diagnosing the sickness behind it and preventing it happening again is far more difficult than calling for a social media ban.
Yet for all this fuss, there is yet to be any reported incident of a ‘schools war’ breaking out. On the day of the alleged fight, the blog London Centric sent a reporter down to the Hackney McDonald’s to see what was what. They discovered many police officers, and a few bored schoolkids, kicking their heels and waiting for action. The whole affair seems to have been a classic moral panic – parents working themselves up into a paddy, caught in a spiral of media hysteria, with authority figures rushing to action and the kids faintly bemused.
I was interested in speaking to the potential participants. Having been a teacher myself – those that can, do; those that can’t, still have an overdraft – I am DBS checked. Still, there did feel something unshakeably ‘noncey’ about phoning up parents and asking to speak to their son about fights. Similarly, taking advantage of my boyish good looks to put on my old blazer and tie, ingratiate myself with some youths, and hang around in burger bars until I witnessed some teenage ultra-violence seemed liable to get me on a Home Office register.
That young boys are violent used to be more widely accepted
Parents forget how feral young boys are. Having first been one myself before teaching Year 7s to Year 11s, let me remind you that your little darlings are not angels. They are violent, hormonal, randy, sweary, nasty, spot-riddled, screen-addicted sadists, bullies and thugs. They spend their days leering at female teachers before swirling the heads of smaller boys down toilets. They have the IQ of baboons with learning difficulties and the table manners to match. They are, in short, shits. This is why we lock them up all day.
That young boys are violent used to be more widely accepted. William Brown from Just William and Dennis the Menace were role models, archetypes and heroes. When William was fighting the Hubert Laneites or Dennis was biffing up Walter the Softie, this wasn’t the behaviour of a thug, but the rough and tumble expected of a boisterous boy. But if young boys read the pair at all today, Richmal Crompton is competing for attention with David Walliams slop and Dennis has been neutered, reworked as an ‘eco-warrior’ in the spirit of Greta Thunberg.
This embodies the pernicious cult of ‘safetyism’. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has identified, it is the self-defeating tendency to protect today’s children from all harm. Easier to keep them at home, hooked on an iPad, than let them play with the nasty boys from the estate. But the same parents are then shocked when their children share these footling attempts to add a little excitement to their cosseted little lives.
A 15-year-old boy and a man in his 20s have now been arrested over the posts; the truth of the ‘school wars’ cannot be far away. But we should not let this panic hobble schools. Extremely violent pupils should be dealt with properly – excluded, locked up, whatever it takes to keep the rest safe. But parents should remember that children have a sense of humour and that a little rough and tumble never did much harm. Boys will be boys.
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