We are failing our girls — and the boys who hurt them - A candid voice on youth, schools and responsibility

Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man lands at a moment of national discomfort. His blunt interrogation of modern masculinity — its anxieties, entitlement and performance — should be required reading in staff rooms and living rooms alike. Because when teachers in our schools are being barked at, sexually harassed and threatened with violence, Galloway’s arguments aren’t abstract cultural critique — they’re a direct indictment of a generation of boys being socialised into cruelty.

The Monash study revealing that female teachers are routinely humiliated, groped, surrounded and baited with manosphere rhetoric should shock every parent who thinks “that sort of behaviour” happens somewhere else. It doesn’t. It is happening where we send our children every day to learn respect, problem‑solve and grow. Instead, too many boys are graduating from online echo chambers preaching dominance, then practising it in classrooms. That is societal malpractice.

Galloway prompts us to ask: what does being a man mean if it involves degrading others to prove yourself? The answer should be obvious: nothing worth preserving. Schools cannot be left to mop up the mess of fractured home cultures, absent fathers, toxic influencers and a viral pornography economy that normalises objectification. And yet the study shows many teachers’ cries for help are met with bureaucratic shrugging — “noted”, “logged”, then forgotten.

Practical steps are not radical. We need clear, enforceable protocols that treat gendered threats as seriously as weapons. We need mandatory, evidence‑based respectful relationships education delivered early and repeated across years. We must fund counselling and behavioural programs for students who display misogyny as a red flag, not merely punish them into resentment. And parents need to be dragged, willingly or not, into the work of modelling empathy, accountability and emotional literacy.

Finally, stop pretending this is only a school problem. It’s cultural. Galloway’s call for men to reject the currency of dominance must be matched by our institutions: schools, sporting clubs, platforms and courts. If we produce men who equate power with humiliation, we will continue to pay the cost in broken classrooms, devastated teachers and, worse, lives.

The country that fails to teach decency to boys will one day be shocked by what its boys have become. Every father should read Galloway, listen to our teachers, and act — now.