How did we get here? Indiscipline, rivalry, reckoning for our schools

Across communities, educators speak of a noticeable shift.

Head teachers report increasing cases of insubordination.

Teachers describe classrooms where authority is routinely contested. 

Parents lament children who seem less responsive to correction.

Students themselves often feel misunderstood, unheard, or overwhelmed.

Discipline once connoted strict adherence to rules and respect for authority.

In many Ghanaian schools, order was historically maintained through corporal punishment.

As such practices have been restricted, the transition toward alternative systems has not always been smooth. 

Rules exist but lack consistent enforcement, and disciplinary decisions are often contested by parents.

Ambiguity breeds inconsistency, and inconsistency weakens authority.

Mobbing incident exposes how tensions extend beyond classrooms.

Rivalry among secondary schools has long been part of Ghana’s educational culture.

Healthy competition in quiz contests and athletics fostered excellence and pride. Yet rivalry that was once playful has hardened into hostility. 

The viral video of the students of the Swedru School of Business physically attacking a pupil from Obrachire Senior High Technical School during a district athletics event, where the victim, struck with stones and sticks, was hospitalised; the six students of Aggrey Memorial Senior High School, arrested for assaulting and robbing a final-year student from Adisadel College, and incidents at the Super Zonal Sports Competition in the Eastern Region where a female student was allegedly gang-raped and a male student stabbed in a separate confrontation, are cases in point.

Smartphones have reshaped school culture. What once happened within school walls now extends into group chats, social media platforms, and viral video circuits.

A fight that might have remained a rumour now becomes a spectacle.

Students document, perform, and upload violence.

Humiliation becomes entertainment. Validation arrives through likes and shares.

In circulating videos, students appear more focused on filming than intervening.

Technology is not inherently destructive, but without digital literacy education and ethical guidelines, it amplifies volatility.

Beyond moral explanations lies structural reality.

Overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers undermine preventive discipline. In some public schools, class sizes exceed optimal ratios. 

A teacher managing sixty or more students cannot provide sustained monitoring. 

Burnout is real. When educators are exhausted and under-resourced, classroom management becomes reactive rather than preventive. Indiscipline flourishes where engagement declines.

The consequences are visible: in the Bono Region, a night security guard at Berekum Senior High School was left unconscious after being beaten by students during a football match when he tried to enforce rules.

In Greater Accra, two students and an accomplice were arrested for assaulting teachers at West Africa Senior High School.

These acts reveal how weakened structures leave even adults vulnerable.

Isolation

Schools do not exist in isolation. Parenting styles have evolved under economic pressures and shifting cultural norms.

Some parents, reacting to memories of harsh schooling, adopt protective stances that sometimes undermine school authority. 

When disciplinary issues arise, confrontation can replace collaboration. Students perceive this fracture between home and school and operate within it.

At the heart of these dynamics is a communication gap. In many schools, discipline is imposed rather than explained.

Students are told what to do, but not always why.

Administrators implement policies without sustained stakeholder dialogue.

When communication is top-down, resentment festers.

When students feel unheard, dissent may surface through misconduct.

The viral videos are painful to watch, but their visibility offers an opportunity.

They force institutional reflection.

They expose vulnerabilities that polite silence might conceal. Indiscipline and violent rivalry are not sudden eruptions. 

They are the cumulative result of shifting norms, digital acceleration, weakened coordination between home and school, and structural strain.

Blame

It is tempting to blame spoiled children, lenient parents, weak administrators, or overly strict teachers.

Such simplifications obscure interdependence. Schools are ecosystems.

When one part destabilises, ripple effects spread. 

Rebuilding a culture of responsibility requires multidimensional action: stronger school-home partnerships, consistent and transparent disciplinary frameworks, investment in teacher support, digital citizenship education, and restorative approaches that combine accountability with empathy.

Student leadership must help redefine pride as achievement rather than aggression.

Secondary school should be a space for intellectual formation and character development, not territorial combat.

The question of how we arrived here matters. But the more urgent question is how we move forward together to ensure that our classrooms once again resonate more with learning than with conflict.

The writer is a communications associate, Institute for Education Studies (IFEST_Ghana).