Another school year has come to an end. What it takes with it, what it leaves behind. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page so we don’t get lost in translation. In Greece, the country that invented everything and understood nothing, we have a strange obsession: we label the cry of a drowning man a «behavioral problem.» And because, as a people, we have an innate penchant for sadism, instead of a life jacket, we throw them a circular on discipline and a threat of expulsion. Thus, so that the young person may learn to respect the institutions that are destined to consign him to the ranks of the unemployed or to the «brain drain»—that elegant term for the modern exodus of degree holders.
I’m reading the figures from the OECD and UNESCO, and I must admit, I’m envious. Not of the children, but of our audacity. We rank 7th worst globally in student satisfaction. In 2015, 27% of Greek children reported being happy. In other words, three out of every four of our children are walking around with an existential black hole in their chests, but there we are, worrying about whether they’re wearing earrings or staging a sit-in.
The «happiness paradox,» as researchers call it, namely that children in Mexico are happier than those in Japan, is nothing more than proof of the failure of the Western capitalist model in its most extreme form. In Japan, people commit suicide because of the pressure to succeed. In Greece, teenagers are suffocating because we demand that they become champions on a track with no finish line—or rather, a finish line that leads to a salary of 600 euros, if they’re lucky.
The children’s happiness collapsed along with the bonds. Except that the bonds were written down by the bankers, while the children’s dreams were shattered by our collective inability to offer them a present that doesn’t make them want to vomit.
And what does the state do? The state, faithful to its role as guardian, invokes «law and order.» When the teenager rebels, when he experiences the despair of an uncertain future, we talk about «delinquency.» It’s a magical, convenient word. It allows you to treat the symptom without addressing the disease.
A teenager is, by nature, a potential rebel. If he feels that the world has a place for him, he will change it by creating. If he feels that the world is throwing him away like trash, he will change it by destroying. It’s so simple that even a Minister of Education could understand it, if he weren’t too busy counting absences.
Violence in schools, gangs in neighborhoods, and a lack of respect are not «signs of the times» that fell from the sky. They are the result of our own indifference. They are the result of a society that views children as an investment or a problem, but never as human beings.
Herein lies the real tragedy. Only 48% of Greek students believe they can improve. The rest believe their fate is sealed from birth. «I’m not cut out for academics,» «I was born to be a nobody,» they say. And they say it because school acts as a filter for social class. If you’re from Peristeri or Drapetsona, the system whispers to you from the very first grade of elementary school that your path is predetermined.
In contrast, during the 2015–2018 period, we saw a glimmer of hope. Vocational high schools (EPAL) ceased to be the «graveyard of the failed» and became a place of support. Why? Because some people remembered that a teacher is not an enforcer, but a collaborator. Because some people realized that a student who acts out doesn’t need to be expelled, but rather a psychologist and a social services program that actually works.
Social problems are solved through social interventions, not through policing. But what is self-evident in Greece is always revolutionary.
If we want to stop the «ticking time bomb» facing young people, we must stop viewing them as mere numbers in the PISA statistics. We must make school a place of creativity again, rather than a waiting room for despair.
But alas! For that to happen, we need a welfare state. And our government prefers to invest in security cameras rather than teachers. It prefers to chase after phantoms of discipline, while our young people—perhaps for the first time in modern history—are realizing that they will live worse lives than their parents.
So keep an eye on the children. Not because they are the «future of the nation» (that hackneyed phrase from national holidays), but because they are the only ones who have the right to hate us for the world we’re handing down to them. And their hatred, if it doesn’t turn into something creative, will turn into a fire. And then, no law and no order will save you.
Let’s now talk about the elephant in the room, which in Greece wears the mask of «paradidactics,» but which we affectionately call a «tutoring center.» The suffocation of the teenager stems from the fact that the public school has been turned into a vast, boring waiting room. The child leads a double life: in the morning, they pretend to be a student in a building that resembles an abandoned government office from the 1980s, and in the afternoon they rush to buy the hope of university admission. This ’education industry« doesn’t just produce knowledge; it produces, above all, exhaustion. It produces young people who, at sixteen, have the look of a middle-aged bank clerk waiting for retirement. And then we wonder why they lack »vision« (as today’s managers of misery like to say) or why they resort to violence. When you deprive a teenager of free time, you deprive them of the right to discover who they are. You turn them into a memorization machine that, when they finally »succeed,« realizes that the prize is a spot in line at the unemployment office.
And of course, there are also the latecomers to the cause of «morality» who blame technology. «Kids are glued to a screen all day,» say parents who haven’t spoken to their child for more than five minutes without arguing about grades. The screen isn’t the cause of alienation—it’s the refuge. In a world where public squares are paved over with concrete and neighborhoods become impersonal warehouses for people, the internet is the only place where a teenager feels like they «belong.».
So, instead of pointing fingers at them for using TikTok, let’s ask ourselves what kind of reality we’ve created for them that makes them want to escape from it. The crisis of values doesn’t start on social media; it starts at the kitchen table, where the only value taught is «mind your own business to survive.».
Every time the Ministry imposes harsher penalties, every time it reinstates «good conduct» requirements or multi-day suspensions, it is admitting its failure. Punishment is the last resort of the incompetent educator and the authoritarian state.
When a child «breaks» school, they are actually trying to shatter the mirror that shows them a future devoid of meaning. If we truly want to «save the children,» we must stop disciplining them and start listening to them. But this requires something the Greek authorities dread: democracy in practice, right there in the classroom. Until then, we’ll keep producing «delinquents» and wondering «what’s wrong,» while the answer stares us right in the face from the desk across the room.
