November 23, 2021 - 10:00am
After eighteen months of disrupted learning, cancelled exams and Covid u-turns, teachers now face a new problem: Tiktok. Reports have been circulating for weeks of teachers being harassed on the social media app; staff have been filmed, impersonated, rated, photoshopped onto pornographic images and accused of everything from homophobia to racism. One video, filmed more than 650,000 times, claims a teacher is “trying to prove he isn’t a paedo.”
This new TikTok ‘trend’ is needlessly cruel, humiliating and distressing; it is no surprise that many teachers who have been targeted have taken sick leave or left altogether.
The videos are a malicious manifestation of many social problems: the lack of respect and deference towards teachers; the slowness and indifference of Big Tech, whose algorithms continue to promote slanderous content; and the inability of schools and parents to effectively control and monitor social media use. Punishments are hard to administer when posts come from anonymous accounts, and police investigations are only an option if the content is criminal.
Female teachers are far from immune from the abuse (I once worked with a female teacher who was secretly filmed on Snapchat and became an unfortunate meme), but a quick glance at the #paedo hashtag on TikTok (I wouldn’t recommend it) shows that male teachers are much more likely to be defamed in this way.
Being a male teacher can be hard enough already. All teachers are worried about safeguarding themselves as well as their pupils, but there is undeniably a different dimension for men. For example, one male colleague told me once that he was nervous about calling out female students on their uniform (for example, telling them to unroll their skirts) for fear of potential backlash after another male colleague was wrongly accused of looking at a student’s legs.
This worry may be genuine, but in the controlled environment of a school accusations are easier to monitor and investigate whereas online they are insidious and intractable. Teachers, or those who are considering the profession, may look at these TikTok stories and decide that the job simply isn’t worth the hassle; on top of the heavy workload, long hours, relentless behaviour issues of students and pay freezes, the potential for online abuse may simply be too much.
We need teachers, and in particular we need male teachers. Around 26% of teachers in the UK are men: 38% in secondary school and only 15% in primary. There are many reasons for this imbalance, including the lingering stereotype that teaching is a ‘feminine’ profession because it involves nurturing and more family-friendly schedules. However, it hasn’t always been this way.
The sad reality is that male teachers can provide a positive role model for the many students who do not have one at home, and as girls continue to outperform boys in exams, male teachers are needed now more than ever. Teachers deserve to feel protected from online bullying, harassment and slander, and male teachers in particular shouldn’t have to fear being called a ‘paedo’ and having their reputations and livelihoods ruined by baseless accusations.
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SubscribeReally shows how social media and big tech are essentially pernicious entities, especially when used by of immature, unformed minds. As these things increase, so does the potential for malicious misuse. I was a secondary school teacher for nearly 20 years, leaving the profession in 2008 as I could stand it no more. That said, I had many good years and retain a lot of fond memories. I am now a self employed private tutor
The article has the intimation that this epidemic is another unintended consequence of measures deployed against the pandemic. No surprises there.
The teaching profession, to an extent, does not help itself given the unquestioning support the unions have given to restrictions, thinking of their own political agenda rather than the genuine welfare of both teachers and pupils.
How is it not libel for TikTok to allow this to be published? It is simply not good enough for these companies to shrug and say it’s too difficult for them to police their content. Trading exchanges aren’t allowed to tolerate fraudulent trading because it’s too difficult; why are these people allowed to?
I’ve always been amazed and shocked at representations of US high schools in American tv dramas and film – the lack of deference and respect to teachers. This goes back long before social media came on the scene. As with everything else, we’re becoming the same.
I was educated in the 1950s in a pre-prep school and prep-school until I took the Common entrance exam to go to a Public School (for US readers that means a Private School) during the 1960s. Virtually all the teachers were male apart from a woman who taught Divinity and Music at my prep-school. Discipline was enforced with the cane where necessary including failures to work hard enough. Of course boys took advantage of the less disciplinary inclined teachers but ultimately the cane backed even them up to ensure a reasonably orderly classroom. The whole thing seems a world away from education today.
While public schools still maintain a balance of male to female teachers today ( but no cane of course) in the 6th form College one of my sons went to virtually all the teachers were women. My son only had women teachers there.
It is hard to compare the two systems in the sense that one seems to be comparing apples and oranges since the two systems seem so dissimilar. In one sense it comes down to a matter of taste and the nature of the pupils.
Clearly the state system seems to be failing boys at present but that may be only partially affected by the gender balance of teachers since the whole ethos of teaching and discipline has changed as has society as a whole over the years.
Certainly there seems to be a relative reluctance to correct errors and a lack of rigour in teaching today, although I am open to being told that this is not so.
Discipline has become a dirty word in educational circles, often associated with corporal punishment. A teacher who suffers behavioral issues in their classroom will be portrayed as the villain and will therefore be very reluctant to reach out to school administrators or leaders. Schools are more concerned with how they appear than what they are actually teaching. As long as everything looks good on the outside, they don’t really care what is happening on the inside.
Progressive teaching methods have led to the de-professionalization of educators, which in turn has led to a mass exodus of responsible adults from the teaching field. It’s an unrewarding job that is no different to glorified babysitting, except there are tests and grades. Most other teachers and school administrators will stab you in the back. Unfortunately, the politics of the playground carry on into the staffroom too. I taught in secondary education for a year before quickly realizing that this toxic environment wasn’t for me.
It is high time to treat smartphones and computers in classrooms as the weapons they are.
TikTok is owned and controlled by the Chinese government, but not permitted in China. All the CCP needs to do to sow distrust and division in the West is ‘seed’ a few campaigns like this one, and mass social media hysteria does the rest. Cui bono? The CCP. Simple, and devastatingly effective. The answer? Ban TikTok.
I left teaching in the UK to find work abroad. I finished my PGCE but didn’t last long. Now I am married to a Vietnamese woman and we have a little boy. I would never allow him to be educated in a UK state school. Not that state schools are better here, but there are more low cost options. The UK schools have been broken by decades of bad ideas and incompetent, mediocre leadership, and yes, sorry to say, an emasculated and inappropriate attitude to behaviour.
Here’s one American who, in mid-life, attempted to make use of an old BS degree by supplementing it with nine Education courses. The intention was to enter the Teaching profession in middle age, as a married man, husband and father of three grown, with a literary education balanced by 25 years of real-world experience as a carpenter.
The outcome, after a year of assisting in classrooms and jumping through systemic hoops, was a false accusation and a veiled invitation to go find something else to do.
So I just wrote four novels instead of teaching.
Go figure!
“with a literary education balanced by 25 years of real-world experience as a carpenter.”
I am a Carpenter, two Carpenters I know – one with a BS in Botany, one a Masters in English Lit, also fell down the slippery slope to being tradesmen….I hate doing construction, but just stumbled along into it…..now days I just work part time, but will likely keep doing it through my 70s as it keeps one fit, and may as well, us old guys have a lot of skills and not using them is wasting something hard gotten….. I do not even need the money, but when I stop work fully I feel like I am just taking, and not contributing to society. To consume, but not produce anything, seems aimless to me now days…
I don’t agree with some of your comments but especially this one about slipping down to being a tradesman. Having worked in construction many moons ago as an engineer, I hugely admire tradesmen and their practical expertise. Loved em. Salt of the earth.
I’m sympathetic, and to an extent in agreement. But at the same time, I do want to see poor teaching, lack of control, rampant wokeism (or racism) exposed when it occurs.
The teaching profession in general is so resistant to examination, and so protective of bad teachers; and classrooms are such a closed environment; that we really do need pupils to give the rest of us a keyhole view of what goes on.
The teaching profession is resistant to examination ?
No, that’s politicians.
Teachers have always been subjected to Inspectors on a regular basis.
You seem to imagine that pupils – often, evilly-inclined, dishonest, idle, malevolent thugs or slags from secondary schools – are more truthful than the teachers you are trying to sabotage.
People like you are destroying our society.
Oh, and I forgot – many of them seem to have a deficit view of the pupils they are supposed to be educating. Something you seem to share. I do hope you are not a teacher.
Sadly, the original video is no longer on YouTube. It made the whole thing far clearer. But there is enough here to get the gist.
Something that was clear in the original video was that the teacher didn’t really understand the issue himself – hence the dogmatic reference to local authority policy.
https://youtu.be/pOUP2yHukMY
No, we do not. Encourage pupils to snoop and try and destroy teachers they don’t like, perhaps because they have given them a bad mark? That has absolutely nothing to do with the power teaching unions or the educational establishment.
I’m assuming you’re not a teacher, because your second paragraph is the complete opposite of everything I’ve heard about the current state of the teaching profession, particularly in the UK. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who have left teaching due to the constant scrutiny, pressure, workload and the fact that nowadays the pupils are the ones with all the power. The pendulum has swung a very long way from “Another Brick In The Wall”. Who’d be a teacher nowadays?
#BelieveAllStudents, isnt that what the teachers have been promoting or does that not apply when the accusations are directed towards them?
As a man, you really would have to be nuts or a masochist to take up teaching on the front line now. Even at University.