I’ll admit I certainly came off a bit more sarcastic than I was intending, and it’s been a good while since I’ve been in grade school, but times of entire classes of students just fully misbehaving have existed before and will likely exist again. I remember even back in the early to mid 2000s the class I was in caused a lot of major problems for my teachers throughout the years to the point that in our 8th grade year, our class was the only one in in years to lose the privilege of going on our New York and Washington DC school trips and the only one in years after to lose those class trips.

Many of the kids were flat out obnoxious jerks and we didn’t have an excuse of “we had multiple years of virtual learning to stunt our development” to lean on.

Believe me I feel sympathy for these kids going through one of the many recent once-in-a-lifetime mass human tragedy events. They’re in a tough circumstance, with teachers trying to do their best in a criminally underfunded education system, after living through the collective trauma that was the pandemic

My intention, albeit sarcastically, was pointing out that our hard wired desire to be social is generally a good thing and what has given us a huge advantage over other creatures. For as much as teachers want to and do make a huge difference in kids lives, the overarching structure is not actually geared to help teachers do their jobs best. There is so much administrative bloat and inefficiency and funding that goes to the top of the structure that gets in the way of teachers being able to focus on teaching their students and provide them with the tools and material necessary to educated kids.