Why is the classroom becoming more and more chaotic? The real reasons why most students don't want to study and teachers can't keep control

Many parents and teachers watch their children sitting in classrooms every day, yet the children are distracted and unfocused; their eyes constantly flick toward their phones, and that growing sense of helplessness in their hearts becomes heavier and heavier. Especially in some vocational schools and rural schools, this is particularly evident. Children lose interest in their textbooks, but they can binge short videos until midnight with one swipe. In class, teachers talk until their throat is dry, while students down below chat, play games, and even lie down and fall asleep. Many people have seen scenes like this with their own eyes, and have also experienced them firsthand.

Think of those frontline teachers: preparing lessons until late into the night in the morning, using every trick in the classroom to make the knowledge more engaging. But what about the students? They have little enthusiasm for physical education, music, and art courses, let alone language arts, math, and other subjects. Their points of interest are almost entirely concentrated on phones, games, and short videos. The data is there—some surveys show that the rate of middle school students becoming disaffected with school is around 30 percent, and the overall prevalence of mental disorders among students aged 6 to 16 enrolled in school is about 17.5 percent; among every six children, one faces psychological difficulties to varying degrees. In rural children, the detection rates of depression and anxiety have at times been as high as above 25 percent, and internet addiction among fifth-grade students in township primary and secondary schools is close to 48 percent. These numbers are not cold, lifeless statistics—they are vivid classroom realities.

Experts and leaders have turned their attention to teachers—improving professional competence, strengthening teaching ability, and revising the curriculum standards again and again. Of course, these efforts have value. But when most students simply don’t want to learn at all, no matter how hard one teacher tries, it’s like building a house on sand: one wave knocks it down. Teaching-research reform has been going on for many years; top-quality lesson demonstrations sound精彩—yet those lessons are often painstakingly polished repeatedly, and the participating students are carefully selected excellent students rather than a true picture of an entire class. In a real classroom, the teacher stands in front of the blackboard lecturing, while students down below each busy themselves with their own things. For language arts, math, and other core subjects, order can barely be maintained, but in other subjects sometimes it is livelier than a produce market.

Why does this kind of situation occur? One important reason is that the management tools teachers can use are becoming increasingly limited. In the past, when students made mistakes, teachers could still assign lines to copy, make them stand for a while, or arrange them to clean up the classroom—those small punishments at least helped remind children to mind the rules. Now, rules increasingly emphasize not causing psychological harm to students. When teachers criticize, they have to choose every word carefully, fearing that a harsh remark will trigger complaints. Students know teachers can’t act against them, so classroom life easily becomes arbitrary. There were teachers who, because their teaching methods were slightly too strict, had parents show up to complain, even affecting their work. Examples like these lead many teachers to choose to protect themselves—if they can avoid it, they avoid it.

After principals and experts have been away from the lectern for a long time, their understanding of the frontline situation may no longer be as vivid as before. Some principals spend more time on meetings and reporting, and don’t get into ordinary classrooms to teach very often. The ideas proposed by experts sound warm and full of care—for example, emphasizing transforming students with kindness and saying that criticism should be done with methods. These words themselves are not wrong; education should put people first. But in reality, some students’ behavior has already gone beyond the scope of ordinary discipline. They don’t take teachers’ words seriously, and even openly confront them. If teachers are even slightly firm, students may directly file complaints, and schools sometimes shift responsibility onto homeroom teachers. When students make mistakes, school leaders often require homeroom teachers to handle things alone; if something big happens, the homeroom teacher may even be disciplined. This logic makes frontline teachers feel under enormous pressure.

In the past few years, the Ministry of Education issued rules on educational discipline for primary and secondary schools, clarifying that schools and teachers can carry out general disciplinary measures for students who violate rules, such as point-out criticism, written self-reflection, and after-school guidance, and for more serious cases, measures like tutoring and suspending participation in group activities. The rules stress educational purpose, legality, and appropriateness, aiming to help students recognize their mistakes and correct their behavior, while also drawing a red line that prohibits corporal punishment and disguised corporal punishment. This was originally a tool to back teachers up—but in actual implementation, many schools and teachers still have heavy concerns. They worry that if they use the measures incorrectly, public opinion will magnify it; they also worry that parents won’t understand. As a result, it becomes even harder to maintain classroom discipline.

Taking vocational schools as an example: many students face relatively small pressure to get into higher education. After entering the school, they find that studying is not so tightly connected to employment, and they become even more likely to let their guard down. In rural schools, the proportion of left-behind children is high; their parents work away from home, and grandparents who take care of them often focus more on making sure they eat well and are dressed warmly, with relatively weaker efforts to cultivate learning habits. When children lack timely companionship and guidance, they can easily feel emotionally empty, so they turn to the internet to find a sense of presence. The content pushed by short-video algorithms is so compelling that you can’t stop once you start swiping. Over time, the classroom becomes the place they least want to be.

Compared with the past, the atmosphere in classrooms really has changed. In the past, if teachers made students stand for a few minutes, students would more or less tone it down. Now, even if teachers want to criticize loudly, they have to weigh it again and again. After students make mistakes, teachers can only talk them through repeatedly—but if the child doesn’t listen at all, the effect is obvious. This kind of cycle makes classrooms more and more chaotic, and makes teachers more and more exhausted. The beautiful images shown in top-quality lesson presentations and the real scenes teachers face every day have a big gap. This doesn’t mean teachers aren’t good enough, or that they aren’t认真, but that the students aren’t willing to cooperate and the problem of not respecting classroom rules is right in front of them.

If education reform only focuses on teaching methods and teacher capability while ignoring students’ willingness to learn and the real classroom order, the effect is naturally limited. When students don’t want to study and teachers can’t manage them, that has become the most prominent contradiction right now. It’s hard to fundamentally change the situation just by adjusting curriculum standards and carrying out teaching-research activities. More people need to come together to find solutions—so students can rediscover the motivation to learn, and so teachers have reasonable means to maintain basic order.

There are many such small stories in everyday life. A homeroom teacher at a rural junior high school had a boy in his class who always loved playing with his phone and secretly watched videos during lessons. The teacher reminded him a few times in a gentle way; the boy agreed on the surface, but then turned around and continued. After a parent-teacher meeting, the teacher and the parents communicated, and they set a simple rule together: the phone would be kept by the parents, and phones would not be brought into the classroom during class. Slowly, the boy’s attention in class became more concentrated, and his grades also showed improvement. This shows that cooperation between home and school, along with appropriate rules, can still work. Conversely, if everything is completely left to the child, the child may sink deeper and deeper.

Another example happened at a vocational school. A Chinese language teacher found that students were interested in the stories in short videos, so he tried combining the lesson content with video clips and guiding everyone to discuss characters’ fates. At first, only a few students took part, but later the discussion became lively, and the classroom atmosphere improved quite a bit. This doesn’t mean all lessons can be changed this way, but it reminds us that by understanding students’ interests and starting from things they are familiar with, perhaps we can narrow the distance. The prerequisite is that the classroom has basic order—otherwise the teacher may not even get the chance to speak.

What do you think about the current classroom situation? Or have your children experienced similar troubles when going to school? Feel free to share your views, and let’s chat about how to make education a bit warmer and more effective.