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 the classroom every day, yet they’re distracted and not fully there—their eyes constantly flick to their phones, and that growing sense of helplessness in their hearts only gets heavier. This is especially obvious in some vocational schools and rural schools. Kids can’t get into their textbooks, but they can scroll short videos until midnight with one swipe. In class, the teacher talks until their throat is dry, while students below chat, play games, and even lie down and sleep. Many people have seen scenes like this firsthand—and experienced them personally.

Think about those frontline teachers: they prepare lessons from early morning until late at night, and in class they bring out every trick, trying to make the knowledge more vivid. But what about the students? They have little enthusiasm even for PE, music, and art classes, let alone Chinese, math, and English. Their interests are almost entirely focused 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%. The overall prevalence of mental disorders among students aged 6 to 16 in school is about 17.5%, meaning about one out of every six children faces psychological difficulties to varying degrees. In rural children, the detection rate of depression and anxiety has at times been over 25%, and internet addiction is close to 48% among fifth-grade students in township primary and secondary schools. These numbers aren’t cold statistics; they are vivid classroom reality.

Experts and leaders have turned their attention to teachers—improving professional quality, strengthening teaching ability, and repeatedly revising the curriculum standards. These efforts are certainly valuable. But when most students simply don’t want to learn, no matter how hard one teacher tries, it’s like building a house on sand—one wave and it falls apart. Curriculum and teaching-research reforms have been underway for many years, and “high-quality lessons” sound精彩（精彩纷呈） and full of highlights. Yet those lessons are often honed repeatedly, and the participating students are carefully selected excellent students—not a true reflection of an entire class. In real classrooms, teachers stand in front of the blackboard and explain, while students down below are busy with their own things. Chinese, math, and English classes can barely maintain order, but other subjects can sometimes be livelier than a vegetable market.

Why does this situation happen? One major reason is that the management tools available to teachers are becoming increasingly limited. In the past, when students made mistakes, teachers could still assign extra copying homework, have them stand for a while, or arrange cleaning duties—these small punishments at least reminded children to pay attention to rules. Now, regulations increasingly stress that students must not be harmed psychologically. When teachers criticize, they have to weigh every word, afraid that a harsh remark will lead to complaints. Students know teachers can’t really do anything to them, so classrooms easily become run according to whim. There have even been cases where teachers, because their disciplinary approach was a bit too strict, were approached by parents at their homes, even affecting their work. Examples like these make many teachers choose self-protection—if they can avoid managing, they do.

When principals and experts stay away from the podium for a long time, their understanding of frontline conditions may not be as vivid as before. Some principals spend more time on meetings and reporting, and don’t often actually step into ordinary classrooms to teach. The concepts proposed by experts sound warm and full of love—for example, emphasizing “transforming with love” and that criticism should be methodical. These statements themselves aren’t wrong; education should be people-centered. But in reality, some students’ behavior has already gone beyond ordinary discipline. They don’t take teachers’ words seriously, and may even openly confront them. If teachers are even slightly more forceful, students might directly file complaints. Schools sometimes even push the responsibility onto the class teacher. This logic makes frontline teachers feel the pressure is enormous.

In the past few years, the Ministry of Education issued the “Discipline Rules for Primary and Secondary Schools,” clarifying that schools and teachers may carry out general disciplinary measures for students who violate rules—such as calling out to criticize them, requiring written self-reflections, or providing after-school guidance. For more serious cases, measures include instruction and suspending participation in group activities, among others. The rules emphasize educational purpose, legality, and appropriateness. The aim is 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 many concerns. They worry that if it’s not used well, public opinion will amplify it. They worry that parents won’t understand. As a result, maintaining classroom discipline has become even harder.

Taking vocational schools as an example, many students have relatively low pressure to get into higher education. After entering the school, they find that learning isn’t as tightly connected to employment as they expected, so it’s easier for them to slack off. In rural schools, the proportion of left-behind children is high—parents go out to work, and grandparents often focus more on making sure they’re fed and clothed, with relatively weaker attention to building good study habits. When children lack timely companionship and guidance, emotionally they’re prone to feeling empty, and then turn to the internet to look for a sense of existence. The content recommended by short-video algorithms is so compelling that once you start, you can’t stop. Over time, the classroom becomes the place they least want to be.

Compared with the past, the classroom atmosphere today really has changed. In the old days, if a teacher made students stand outside for a few minutes, they would somewhat rein in their behavior. Now, even when teachers want to criticize loudly, they have to weigh it again and again. After students make mistakes, teachers can only repeatedly talk with them to build rapport. But if the child doesn’t listen at all from the start, the effect is obvious. This kind of cycle makes the classroom more and more chaotic and teachers more and more exhausted. The wonderful scenes shown in “high-quality lesson” presentations are far from the real situation teachers face every day. This isn’t to say teachers aren’t capable, and it’s not that they aren’t认真（认真）. It’s that the problem of students being unwilling to cooperate and not respecting classroom rules is right there in front of everyone.

If education reform only focuses on teaching methods and teachers’ abilities while ignoring students’ willingness to learn and the real classroom order, then the results are naturally limited. When students don’t want to learn and teachers can’t manage them, it has become the most prominent contradiction right now. Adjusting curriculum standards and doing teaching-research activities alone can hardly fundamentally reverse it. What’s needed is for more people to come up with solutions together—so students can find motivation to study again, and so teachers can have reasonable tools to maintain basic classroom order.

In everyday life, there are no shortage of such small stories. In a rural junior high school, a class teacher had a boy in the class who always loved playing with his phone and secretly watched videos during class. The teacher gently reminded him a few times; the boy seemed to agree on the surface, but when the teacher turned around, he kept going. After one parent-teacher meeting, the teacher communicated with the parents, and together they made a simple set of rules: the phone would be kept by the parents, and phones would not be brought into the classroom during class. Gradually, the boy’s attention in class improved a bit, and his grades also showed some progress. This shows that when home and school cooperate, along with appropriate rules, it still can work. On the other hand, if you completely allow it, the child may sink deeper and deeper.

Another example happened in a vocational school. A Chinese language teacher found that students were interested in the stories in short videos, so he tried to combine the textbook content with video clips, guiding everyone to discuss characters’ fate. At first, only a few students participated, but later the discussions became lively and spirited, and the classroom atmosphere was much more active. This doesn’t mean every class can be changed this way, but it reminds us that understanding students’ interests and entering from things they’re familiar with may help narrow the distance. But the prerequisite is that the classroom has basic order—otherwise the teacher won’t even get the chance to speak.

What do you feel about the current state of classrooms? Or has your child at home encountered similar difficulties when going to school? You’re welcome to share your thoughts, and let’s talk together about how to make education a bit warmer and more effective.