Teyah Parent, features editor
If you scroll through TikTok or Instagram Reels long enough, you’ll find a familiar genre of student content: “School didn’t teach me anything.” These posts often refer to high school or middle school and rack up thousands of likes, usually paired with captions like, “teaching myself everything the night before the test.” For some, it’s funny and relatable. The comments are full of “real” and “so true.” But there’s an uncomfortable truth behind the humor. You cannot check out mentally for an entire class period and then claim that school failed to teach you. Much like you can’t constantly disrupt class, ignore directions and then insist a teacher is “out to get you.” At some point, we have to be honest about what learning actually requires.
Learning is about mental engagement. If what you’re supposed to be learning isn’t actually processed, it cannot be learned. That’s not an opinion, that’s how memory works. Your brain has to encode information before it can store it. If you’re half-listening while texting under your desk or watching short videos during a lecture, the information never fully enters your brain. And, if it never enters your brain, it can’t move into long-term memory. There’s no magic backup system recording the lesson for you.
Learning is about mental engagement. If what you’re supposed to be learning isn’t actually processed, it cannot be learned. That’s not an opinion, that’s how memory works.
teyah parent
The narrative of “I don’t pay attention in class, so I’ll just teach myself later” sounds independent, but in practice, it’s usually ridiculous. Zoning out leads to missing key information. Missing key information leads to scrambling to catch up. Scrambling to catch up leads to frustration and, often, zoning out again. It becomes a cycle. This is fragmented learning. Basically, patching gaps in knowledge during panic studying the night before an exam. You might pass the test, sure. But what you gain is surface-level understanding of important topics and poor long-term retention. That’s why so many students say, “I learned this last year, but I don’t remember any of it.” It’s not always because the class was useless. It’s because the engagement was inconsistent.
There’s also a practical consequence. When students don’t build foundational understanding over time, they’re more likely to feel desperate when exams come around. Studies have shown that students who struggle with attention and engagement are statistically more likely to cheat, according to Ohio State News. Not necessarily because they’re bad people, but because they never fully understood the material in the first place. When you rely on cramming instead of consistent focus, you’re building a sand castle, and the tide is rising.
Accountability goes both ways, though. I don’t mean to say that every teacher is perfect, that every class is automatically engaging or that every school system works flawlessly. Schools absolutely have a responsibility to improve teaching methods, move away from passive, monotonous lectures, and adapt to new generations of learners who have grown up in a digital world. Attention spans are changing. Classrooms should evolve too.
But students also have agency. They can’t scroll through class, ignore assignment instructions, and mentally clock out every day and then go online to say that “school didn’t teach me anything.” No, babe; school was teaching. You just weren’t paying attention. You were taught something —you just weren’t there to learn.