Teachers aren’t here to raise your kids. That’s your job

September 8, 2026 — 1:30pm

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The best thing I’ve heard in the whole catastrophe around boys at school is this: a headmaster at a Catholic boys school, Sydney’s St Joseph’s College, imploring his students to be better men.

Principal Michael Blake gave this all-school speech at the end of August. That was the week we’d heard about multiple alleged sexual assaults and endless reports of chaos in schools. And that was on top of all the stuff that never gets reported.

He said: “The way we educate young men is under scrutiny. So, it has been a tough week to be a man.”

And just when you thought he was going to tell us “not all men”, instead he talked about how much harder it is to be a woman. “As tough as this week might have been to hear the media stories, it has been infinitely harder to be a female.”

You said it, brother. Every day. Every week. And mostly when we hear from headmasters, principals, whatever they are called, we hear defensiveness. That the horrors were a weird blip, that the offending boy was a really good guy.

Then we hear, as a fix, a chorus on the importance of respectful relationship training in schools and suggestions of behaviour curriculums. I have no faith in the latter for reasons I’ll get to – and respectful relationship training in high schools comes about 10 years too late. Way, way too late. I think it is........

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