span style=”font-size: 11pt”>When Antoinette Keane – a teacher and the mother of two teenage boys – overheard her colleagues talking excitedly about playing the smash-hit Netflix drama Adolescence to pupils, she was alarmed.
Keane teaches English and has spent her career showing children how to sort fact from fiction and understand the concepts of bias and perspective. And yet, amid the breathless reactions to the show from the Prime Minister down, she believes a dangerous narrative is being spun that Adolescence has uncovered some sort of truth about boys.
The four-part drama follows Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old who is arrested for murdering a schoolmate, Katie, after he has been radicalised online. Over the course of the undeniably compelling series, we watch as police visit the local comprehensive, a psychologist evaluates Jamie in prison, and his parents cope with the devastating aftermath of his actions. Tens of millions of people have watched it worldwide – including Sir Keir Starmer, who has now decreed that it should be shown in schools around the country.
“As a piece of fiction it is very good,” says Keane, “but as the mother of white British teenage boys, I am very against the idea that it taps into some sort of universal experience of white British teenage boys – I live and work with them and can tell you that is simply not the case. If we show it in schools, we are saying we believe that this is who they are.”
For Keane, there are a number of further problems. Firstly, we are exclusively engaged in Jamie’s world, rather than Katie’s. “It is his story, his challenges, his family, his voice,” she says. “Her voice is erased – that was a creative choice they made, and in terms of art, it works very well, but it is a disaster as an educational resource.”
She also believes that a drama with a damning view of education probably shouldn’t be shown in schools. “In the second episode, there is only one competent teacher,” she says. “The others are putting on videos instead of teaching, while the well-meaning but ineffective head teacher doesn’t instil any confidence. Nobody stops or changes or guides pupil behaviour. Not only is this not fair – there are good, nurturing teachers everywhere – but if you show this in a school, you are undermining yourself as you do so. You are saying, ‘We are powerless’.
We, the teachers, are powerless – and you, young lads, are potential scum. Give you access to social media and you turn into killers.
”Ultimately, what we should have learnt by now is that education by television rarely works. “Adolescence is an incredible piece of storytelling that has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the issues of sexism and misogyny amongst young people,” says Sean McGrath, a director who has written a play about trauma and consent that is now performed in schools around the country.
“But we must remember that [Adolescence] was written to inform and influence an adult audience, and in my opinion, is not age-appropriate for young teenagers. Showing it in schools is a bit like using Schindler’s List to teach Year 7s about antisemitism, or Requiem for a Dream to warn them about drugs – powerful, yes, but not created with the developmental, emotional, or psychological needs of young people in mind.”
