In schools today the mental health of students is never far from the forefront of a teacher’s mind. I learned this early in my teaching career, on the second day of my teaching placement at a school in Victoria’s eastern outer suburbs. While I was struggling to get a Year 9 class to read Macbeth, an alarm sounded and we were put into lockdown. Doors were locked, blinds pulled down and students and staff were instructed to stay inside. Of course, questions fly through your mind: is there an intruder on the school grounds, a school shooter, a disgruntled parent, or has there been a brawl between students? But what had occurred was the symptom of a more insidious, widespread and quieter threat to our children than the headline grabbing violence occurring in our classrooms. That threat is the youth mental health crisis and the reason my school had been locked down was because a fourteen-year-old girl had intentionally thrown herself off the second floor of the building we were in. She survived the attempt, thank God, and an ambulance took her away to treat her injuries. There was a staff briefing later on that day to address what had happened and counselling was offered – but overall school went on as normal that week. There lingered on a dread that silenced any further mention of it, as if bringing it up would bring bad omens or copycat attempts. Evidently it had not been the first mental health incident at that school and was unlikely to be the last. This, the school seemed to say, was the way things are.

This episode, while a tragedy in itself, is part of a larger trend of declining mental stability within our schools. The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on youth mental health report, published earlier this year, was the culmination of four years’ work confirming this decline in youth mental health and the lack of support for children and teenagers suffering from mental illness in Australia. This report consulted 50 leading figures in mental health research, with lead author Professor Patrick McGorry stating that, “Over the last 15 to 20 years, we’ve seen an alarming rise, a 50 per cent increase in the need for care in this age group.” Additionally, a 2022 report from the government’s Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) also showed that youth depression, anxiety, and suicide rates have been rising since the 1990s, predictably this trend has been followed with a sharp rise in the prescription of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs for adolescents. The prescriptions of drugs, such as SSRIs and benzodiazepines, have also become more ubiquitous within the school environment and in the medical world, with the majority of antidepressants now prescribed by GPs rather than paediatricians or psychiatrists. Indeed, this last point has prompted the TGA to recommend more stringent rules concerning the prescriptions of antidepressants by GPs.

Clearly this is a complex issue with many moving parts. However, the question of what role schools should take in addressing this crisis is clearly important. Schools are the main social hub for children, they represent the first community entered other than the family children are born into. It is also worth noting that schools are increasingly taking on more and more of a parental role as parents spend longer hours at work. It should first be asserted that teachers need not be expected to be dabbling psychologists, managing to teach numeracy and literacy while also diagnosing and treating mental illness. At the same time however we cannot let schools off the hook entirely, a wayward or ill community is bound to cause mental disturbance even in well-adjusted children. As Mark Fisher, a British philosopher who himself suffered from acute depression, has argued, “”the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.” Therefore, as Fisher calls for an expansion in perspective we too should expand our perception of the relation between education and mental health. In this we can appeal to a classical ideal captured in the Ancient Greek term, paideia. The word paideia referred to both culture and education at once. It was a process which did not prescribe standing back to let a child ‘naturally’ bloom, but aimed to form well-rounded citizens that would be of service to the community in more than just economic terms. In many ways it bears similarities to the modern ideal of holistic education though there are crucial differences as will be discussed later.

But could a better paideia, a better suited community or culture, have stopped that teenage girl from jumping off our school building? To be honest, I am not sure. What I will argue however is that within a better culture she would be less likely to see life as irredeemable and hence less likely to commit such an action, and that in the aftermath of such an event a community would be able to better reckon with what had occurred. Indeed, with such a culture our nation would be better able to cope with what is happening all over Australia and prevent the need to overmedicate or have every second child in therapy. To illustrate, let me outline how modern education is complicit in the mental health crisis, particularly regarding the implicit worldview we impart to the young today.

How a worldview can be implicitly communicated was most clearly demonstrated to me by a secondary school counsellor supporting a middle school cohort with high rates of school refusal and anxiety. One day this counsellor collected the cohort to talk about the scientific reasons behind anxiety – thinking this would comfort them, a move characteristic of the analytical domineering approach of modern schooling. She briefly recapped how evolution works, i.e the death of inferior members of a species and continuation of favourable traits in offspring, and continued on by pointing out that their anxieties about school were left over adaptations from the cavemen era, no longer relevant to our current environment. As she concluded the talk, they evidently were not comforted but looked confused and worried. For rather than bestowing mastery and control, the idols of Enlightenment philosophy, she had rendered their anxiety as arbitrary and pointless, only significant in marking them as inferior members of the species destined to die out. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” as the saying goes. And this culture of arbitrary disconnection is one I experienced myself at school in the 2000s, one that became especially prevalent during my teenage years when a string of train suicides happened within my local area. As teenagers we simply were not equipped to comprehend, let alone bear with dignity, the pain rippling through our community. Rather than comprehending in reverence and reflection, we insulated ourselves through apathy, nihilism, and cynical humour. Our current zeitgeist, characterised by materialism and hedonism, suggests suffering has no meaning or dignity. Progressive educators have bemoaned the so-called banking theory of education for the past few decades, spawned from Paolo Freire’s Marxist and somewhat inaccurate critique of Western education as treating students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge by the teacher. However, the issue of education today is the treatment of the world and human nature as empty vessels to be shaped at will.

In my previous article on school behaviour, I highlighted the damage done by the educational philosophy of Dewey and Rousseau, however regarding the mental instability of our students the honour belongs primarily to Nietzsche. The Nietzschean attitude is surprisingly pervasive and comes through in the glib phrases used by parents, administrators and teachers: the most important thing is being happy, life is what you make it, and the high commandment to live your truth. Second place prize would go to the radical scepticism of Descartes that divorced the unity of mind and reality into his res cogitans and res extensa. To illustrate you might imagine a depressed teenager yoked under this Cartesian and Nietzschean culture attempting to search for meaning. “Why should I not end my life?” this depressed teenager might wonder, “Because my parents love me? Parents loving their children is a social construct, and love is just a chemical reaction. Because by committing suicide I would hurt people? That hurt is not something I would subjectively feel, it’s their truth not my truth. My truth is I’m lonely and suffering because there is no such thing as truly relating to others. I’m suffering, and there’s no value in my suffering because the point of life is to have fun, so I may as well die.”

This impoverished worldview is especially insidious because it can camouflage itself against genuinely noble principles while simultaneously subverting them.  This was demonstrated to me recently in conversation with a class of 16-year-olds about their future ambitions and what they saw as the purpose of their lives. One student declared proudly they wanted to spend their life helping animals, a seemingly noble goal but when asked why she responded, “Because it makes me feel good.” I followed up by asking if it would still be a good way to spend your life even if it did not make her feel good, she said no. And then we explored a hypothetical of how she would spend her life if hurting animals made her feel good. While initially resistant due to being the sort of person who enjoys helping animals, she eventually had to admit through Socratic questioning that hurting animals would be a good way to spend a life if it felt good. That is, as long as it was socially acceptable to torture animals, after all no one wants to get cancelled.

Modern education is constantly teaching children to prop up dead virtues, and wave limp hands to parents and teachers like a scene from A Weekend at Bernie’s. Virtue has not been exiled from schools but merely sidelined as one way among others of having fun and being happy. This frequently happens through the relativisation of virtues, as John Ruskin observed of the degeneration of humility in his age: “We regard it as a relative quality. We humble ourselves to this one and that, bow to the prince and lord it over the peasant.” In schools this relativising often occurs through the exchange of virtues for values. Values are relativist and self-created, whereas a virtue must be discovered and conformed to. In this point I am indebted to the work of Ian Benson, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, as he writes:

In a values framework, those who think they are standing up for something like “family values” are actually squatting. The hopeful person at a school board meeting who thinks he or she is communicating something true when they speak of “Christian values” is mistaken. In the current climate, such an expression ends up sounding like this: “I speak of the values that a Christian like me holds.” Yawn. Next speaker please.

Moral relativism appears inviting at first, promising freedom from the strictures of the absolute, but is a poison for developing a healthy self-image, a sense of community, and sense of purpose. The modern self is asserted to have endless potential, but where one can imagine oneself as endlessly changeable, one also imagines oneself as utterly ephemeral and ultimately the result of an arbitrary sequence of biological and atomic events. As discussed earlier in relation to the school counsellor, the self-image implicitly promoted to students is little more than of a suffering jumped up ape, whose only advantage over other animals is an awareness of its own misery. An aimlessness pervades which gives no defence against addictive indulgences in substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, gambling) and ideological abuse (woke-ism, radical feminism, Andrew Tate idolatry). Even in the well-adjusted individual we find the modern self is ever intoxicated by cycles of fashion and technological distraction. The modern self, as Walker Percy wrote in his satirical self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, “[is] a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.”  While written in the 80s, Percy’s observations are highly relevant to the age of social media where many children learn how to self-brand on Instagram before they have a fully developed concept of self.

The ways in which teachers, parents, and administrators have reacted to the predictably disastrous results of this impoverished sense of self has only exacerbated the situation. In absence of the objectivism of virtue-oriented ethics and without attendance to man’s spiritual life, an initiative like ‘holistic education’ falls far from cultivating the ‘whole person’ despite widespread adoption by mainstream schools. What holistic education devolves into, if it is not supported by a sound anthropology and cosmology, is crude utilitarianism and emotionalism. The good life is reduced to getting good grades, getting extracurricular awards, being popular, and feeling good. This ignores the crucial fact that it is perfectly possible to be a good person without these qualities, indeed it could arise that the sacrifice of some of these or all would be necessary to be virtuous. The stunted holistic approach has led to pandering and coddling around any negative feelings, such as disappointment in response to an academic result.

This also extends to a denial of disadvantage, observed through vocabulary shifts. Disabled has become ‘differently-abled’, special education has become specific education, and neurological disorders are classified under the term neurodiverse. Under these revisions, the word normal has become a slur and replaced by ‘neurotypical’. The change being pushed for here is far more revolutionary than simply asserting the dignity of individuals despite their disabilities. For now we must pretend these disorders are not detrimental and merely different. In response many autistic individuals with a more realistic view of their disorder have called for a push back against this movement due to fears it is hampering attempts to cure or lessen the effects of autism which many neurodiversity advocates see as a tantamount to genocide. As ludicrous as the neurodivergence movement is, there is seemingly no other valid alternative for progressives in recognising the dignity of disadvantaged children other than denying that disadvantage exists. No alternative exists because under a materialist and utilitarian worldview there is no dignity intrinsic to the homo sapien. Darwinism has no intrinsic dignity for them, neither does Marxism nor woke politics. The conformed child under a tyrannical teacher obviously has no dignity but neither does the pandered child of a student-centred classroom who has power but no dignity. Pandered students eventually cotton on that they are untested according to any objective criterion and that sense of power is soon gnawed by doubts, needing to be satisfied by greater and greater demands.

This affects not only those who struggle at school because of learning disabilities but also those who are considered successful. The high flyers are great, but only as great as the last thing they did. Higher and higher extrinsic accolades are needed to maintain self-worth, sacrifice after sacrifice demanded by the altar of the voracious self. Contributing to this malaise, as detailed by researchers like Judith Locke and Jonathan Haidt, are excessively over-protective parents. These parents have pressured school leaders to then in turn over-manage their teachers into over-teaching and coddling the students. It has become an everyday occurrence to have students running from classrooms in tears and this is occurring despite being pumped with copious amounts of anti-anxiety drugs. Mental fragility and overbearing parenting has created a phenomenon in which the teacher is continually lowering expectations to prevent the self-worth of students from shattering and dealing with complaints from parents and administrators. The sheltering from all adversity and disappointment, as has been well observed by psychologists, only increases anxiety in the long run. Hence a vicious feedback loop emerges in which both academic standards and mental stability fall together in a death spiral.

A look back for a way forward

For the sake of our children’s mental stability what is needed are schools equipped to give them a stable sense of self-worth. As we have established, dignity cannot be rescued when worldly success is all that matters nor can dignity be found under the intoxication of pandering and coddling. The question we must ask is – where is human dignity to be found and how can we point our students towards it? In the first place it is crucial to strip away the fantasies haunting our modern ideas of human nature and reexamine ourselves in the light of tried-and-true wisdom. To begin we must discard Rousseau’s idea that all are born naturally benevolent and are corrupted by society. Through this we can welcome back imperfection from its exile. As Daniel Buck, author of What is wrong with our schools? writes:

Ultimately, Rousseau’s idealistic view of humanity is suspect. Be it Christian conception of original sin, Thomas Hobbes’ declaration that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” or simple scepticism of the faculties of a mind developed through the mindless process of natural selection, most philosophies agree there is something rotten in the state of man. Even if we could somehow craft a perfect system, middle school boys would still pick fights and conversations would still get catty or cruel.

We might also add the Ancient Greek and Roman contribution to this expressed in the stoic ideal of amor fati, the love of one’s fate no matter what it may bring, the acceptance of trials as good or at least necessary. At its core amor fati, and the Greek tragedies it was embodied in, gave wise warning for us to steer clear of hubris lest it lead us to Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. This principle is also famously found in the Book of Proverbs as “pride comes before the fall”. Stoic grit and humility are both in sore need in our schools, however, as a principle amor fati can be imbalanced and lead to a placid acceptance of injustice because “one wants nothing to be different” as Nietzsche defines amor fati.

The related but nobler sentiment is found in one who can stand the indifference of the world but still hope for something different. We find this universal longing even in the far East despite its domination by fatalist pantheism and its regard of the world as illusionary and temporary as a morning dewdrop. The famous Japanese poet Issa wrote the following haiku in search of this nobler sentiment, seeking both hope and stoic acceptance after the death of his youngest daughter:

This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

However, the clearest expression comes not from the far East but from the Hebraic and Christian tradition. Here we find the groundwork for hope and many figures that can stand the vicissitudes of life but still hope for things to be different, for deliverance. The groundwork is, of course, laid in the story of man’s fall from the paradise of Eden, his responsibility in this fall and its consequences. From there we can point to Job, who has all taken from him but shows that his love is not out of the bribery of a pleasurable life but truly for God in Himself, as he concludes, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Here the humility that is promoted is not an effete servility, but rather a steadfast love impervious to Fortune’s fickle hand.

But what are the anthropological grounds for such a hope?  Again, we can return to Hebraic and Christian tradition and highlight the description of man composed of spirit as well as matter, and our creation in the image of God. To bear God’s image means that we too, though fallen, have a relation with the divine, we are in other words given sound reason to hope. It is this dialectic between the fall and bearing the Imago Dei which in the past allowed us to reckon with both our imperfection and our glory. The supreme expression of this ordering has perhaps been through Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane, in which He hopes for the cup to pass Him by but ultimately embraces the path laid by the Father’s will. This dialectic has been lost within our secularised and contemporarised school system which aims its high-powered sights at a future-proofed 21st-century education, unaware it is walking off a cliff.

As a point of comparison we can look to where a renewal of this intrinsic dignity and its requisite anthropology is taking place, namely in the rise of classical education in the United States. Like the ideal of paideia, classical education’s ultimate aim is forming well-rounded adults. The most comprehensive research which demonstrates this is the University of Notre Dame’s Good Soil Report – “a 2018-19 comparative study of 24-42 year old alumni from public, secular private, Catholic, evangelical Christian, religious homeschool, and ACCS (classical Christian) schools, on topics of life-choices, preparation, attitudes, values, opinions, and faith practices.” The report is well worth reading in full but I will highlight a few of the advantages of a classical education. In comparison to graduates from other school sectors, classical Christian school graduates had a significantly more positive outlook on life, felt far more ready for tertiary education and life beyond secondary school, achieved higher tertiary degrees, scored higher in reading, participated more in community service initiatives and were more likely to retain their faith as adults. At this point, detractors might ask, “What about creative and divergent thinking?” Interestingly the research also pointed to a higher capacity for independent thought, challenging societal norms, tolerance of other religions, and engaging with literature outside of held beliefs. As well as the Good Soil Report, I would invite interested readers to research further in ‘The Joy of Education’ report from The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE), ‘Classical Education: An Attractive School Choice for Parents’ a report written by Brandon McCoy, and the 2024 Market Analysis on Classical Education by Arcadia Education. What these reports show above all is that classical education is not a grandiose dream but a genuine and effective way forward for schools.

For a glimpse down the path we are currently on, as schools shed Western traditions and the stable anthropology bestowed by them, we can look to arch-transhumanist Yuval Hariri and his vision of the future in his best-selling book Sapiens:

If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions-none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

It is a striking vision but unoriginal. Huxley already envisioned a near identical future in Brave New World, where an unreal happiness is guaranteed not by SSRIs, Prozac, and Oxycontin but by a fictional drug called Soma. Thus, even if classical education stands as a hypothetical future for the moment, it is a hope far more real than the distorted reality experienced today by many of our students perplexed by intoxicants both pharmaceutical and ideological.

Conor Ross