If your kids are at school, set aside four hours and binge-watch “Adolescence”
IF YOU HAVE children in school, do yourself a favour and watch the latest “blockbuster offering” on Netflix, a four-part drama entitled “Adolescence”.
It has everything one could want from a television drama.
The plot is a taut story-line about teenage angst, social media bullying and the destruction of a family unit that seems particularly unremarkable until the teenage son is arrested for the murder of a female classmate.
The main actors’ performances are superb. Stephen Graham, long a stalwart of the UK screen fraternity, produces what may be the best performance of a long and storied career as the tormented father, and at the other end of the acting spectrum young Owen Cooper is simply mesmerising as the 13-year-old son: it is almost impossible to believe his only previous acting experience was limited to a school play.
In the scene of an interview with the Erin Doherty’s psychologist, Cooper copes with the challenge of transforming his character from an introverted youngster – who wets himself when the police burst into his bedroom – into a snarling, rage-filled killer. It is an astounding feat, and the drama is accentuated by the one-reel camera work, in which each episode is shot on a single camera in one continuous loop.
The main thrust of “Adolescence”, according to the series’s screenwriter, Jack Thorne, is to bring public awareness onto the problem of young, impressionable minds having access to the poisonous propoganda of incel influencers like Andrew Tate.
All of which is laudable.
However, the scenes that left the biggest impression on me were those that took place in the school which both the victim and the murderer attended. As the camera swoops through the school’s classrooms, corridors and parking lot, the viewer is presented with a “slice-of-life” presentation of a normal urban high school in Britain.
While the children run riot and the teachers battle to keep control, it becomes depressingly obvious that the inmates have taken over the asylum. I shouldn’t be surprised, considering that my own 14-year-old son was once threatened with a knife in the playground of his school in Surrey: by a girl, by the way, and many years before social media.
So why was I so affected by scenes which were much in line with my expectations?
It wasn’t that the children had coalesced into a rowdy mob. It wasn’t that the teachers would clearly have preferred to be somewhere – anywhere – else.
It was the realization that the school was so obviously failing in its sole function: to teach the kids something about life. It was clear that no child could learn what they needed to learn in such an environment.
And the missing ingredient – the ONLY missing ingredient – needed to change things for the better was discipline.
“Ah,” you may say, “easier said than done, now that teachers are more likely than bigger children to be accused of bullying.”
Agreed, it’s not easy – but it is possible, as “Britain’s strictest school principal” has proven. New Zealand-born Katharine Burbalsingh founded the Michaela Coomunity school in Wembley Park in London in 2014.
Housed in a disused office block in an unattractive part of the London inner-city, the school has a “zero tolerance” policy towards bad behaviour, which is explained to all new incoming Grade 7 learners at a week-long boot camp. Children moving between classrooms do so in single file and in silence, and may never gather together in groups of more than four.
The children read five Shakespeare plays during their time at Michaela, and the staff apparently “disregard much of the 21st Century perceived wisdom about teaching”. There are serious punishments for bad behaviour, but also rewards for outstanding achievements. One of the school’s objectives is to teach the children to be helpful and kind.
Not surprisingly, it has consistently produced outstanding academic results and in 2022, 2023 and 2024 it was rated as the top performing school in all of England.
Surely there is a message in all this that is too obvious to miss.