In April this year, a 16-year-old Brisbane student from a prestigious private school was charged with preparing for a terrorist act. Police alleged the student had purchased materials to create explosives and planned a drone attack on the home of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He wasn’t a radical from the fringes, he was a student in a school uniform.

It forces a confronting question: What conditions make an Australian student believe political murder is an option?

In an increasingly radicalised political climate, where outrage spreads faster than facts, the school environment plays a defining role in shaping what young people see as normal, acceptable, and admirable. At my school, student wellbeing is built into the structure of daily life, with teachers expected to model a culture of safety, inclusion, and respect to help grow not just capable scholars, but decent people.

On the 10th of September, Charlie Kirk – a moderately conservative political commentator and influencer, was assassinated. The tragedy was widely condemned across the political spectrum, with both sides largely agreeing that no one deserves to die for their beliefs. Leaders from all sides, including our own Prime Minister, have reiterated that in a democracy, we fight with ballots and words, not bullets.

The day the news broke, it was all anyone could talk about. In one of my classes that day, a student asked the teacher what they thought about Charlie Kirk being murdered. While there’s no official transcript of the teacher’s exact words, it was essentially along the lines of, ‘I think it’s great. He kind of deserved it.’ Then, another student spoke up – half-joking, half-testing the boundary. ‘What about Trump? Should he be assassinated too?’ Again, the teacher shrugged and said something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, I hope so. The world would be better off.’

This is deeply concerning. It wasn’t just an inappropriate comment. It was a teacher, an adult, a person in power, endorsing violence. They were expressing joy that someone had been murdered and wishing the same fate on another.

And in that moment, two issues became clear.

Firstly, the teacher should not have made any political statement at all.

Classrooms are not platforms for personal ideology. As noted by the Senate Education and Employment Committee, teachers are expected to remain impartial and avoid letting personal beliefs influence students’ learning or treatment. This is a larger issue in itself, as evidenced by other moments I’ve experienced this year – like when one teacher made our class line up in order of whether we preferred Trump or Obama (the teacher later said they aim to have everyone on the Obama side by the end of the year), or when another continuously casually referred to Trump as a ‘Nazi’ (which I found ironic, considering Trump is a strong supporter of Israel).

I could spend all day listing examples. Political bias among teachers clearly varies in intensity, from subtle commentary to more extreme cases, like one of my teachers who, in nearly every lesson, rants about how ‘Trump took away all of women’s rights’.

Secondly, when an adult in authority says a political figure ‘deserved’ to die, or that they ‘hope’ another is killed, the classroom boundary shifts. The comment does not stay theoretical. It normalises violence as a legitimate endpoint of political disagreement. It replaces debate with elimination.

One of the first phrases to appear on my school’s website is their declaration of offering an education where students uphold moral values. I can only wonder what morals ‘murdering people you don’t like’ aligns with.

Teachers are not just content-delivery systems. They are role models, whether they want to be or not. Their words carry extra weight because grades, references, and daily approval sit behind them.

When a teacher signals that murder is an acceptable outcome for the ‘wrong’ politics, students hear two messages:

To those who oppose the targeted figures: your anger has permission to escalate; murder is sometimes okay and a good thing.

To those who share the targeted ideology: you are not safe here. The adult in charge would prefer certain people like you to be dead.

A student in that second group could reasonably think, ‘If my teacher wants someone of my ideology dead, how am I safe in this room? Will my marks suffer if I speak up? Will my classmates pile on because the teacher set the tone?’ Even if no mark is ever changed, the chilling effect is real. Silence becomes self-defence. That is not education. That is intimidation by ambience.

Cultures are built from countless moments where adults either raise the standard or lower it. Every time authority figures treat violent talk as witty or righteous, they sand down the taboo. They make extremity feel normal. For a tiny, unstable minority, ‘normal’ becomes action. That is why leaders across politics denounce violence even against opponents they despise: not because they’ve suddenly turned into friends, but because they understand that permission is contagious.

Open political discussion is healthy – when done properly. As a politically active student, I’ve found the best teachers are the ones who keep the centre steady, invite competing views, and create a space where disagreement sharpens you, not silences you.

But what I experienced in that lesson is different. Hoping someone is assassinated is not ‘joining the debate’. It is the opposite of debate. It announces that some people do not deserve participation or protection; that killing them would tidy the argument. Cross that line, and the teacher has stopped teaching. They are recruiting – if not for a cause, then for a habit of mind that authorises cruelty. Various other teachers who were asked the same question – whether they thought Charlie Kirk deserved it – responded with either ‘no comment’ or a smirk and ‘it’s a complicated topic’. That is not much better; the fact that the instinctive response isn’t an immediate rejection of violence is deeply concerning, and it risks subconsciously normalising the idea for students.

Schools like mine will claim to prioritise respect, impartiality, and student wellbeing – and on paper, they do. But the evidence clearly does not show this. Politics in the classroom is at higher levels than ever, fuelled by an increasingly radicalised media landscape and online echo chambers. The last thing we need is teachers, the very people meant to model calm, informed behaviour, engaging in lies, hate, and promoting violence.

If a classroom cannot keep faith with words over violence, we will keep waking up to headlines that ask, again and again, how a child learned to believe that killing is an answer.

The anonymous author is a young student.