“Good Boy!”: Memes, Youth Culture and a New Form of Literacy

Written By Jamie Dinler

It’s a lively morning in my classroom in Cairo. I ask a student to take out their book. They reach into their bag and place it on the desk passively. A voice excitedly pipes up in a mocking, condescending voice from the other side of the room: “Good boy!”, and the class erupts in laughter.

In another lesson a student eagerly gives a correct answer, responding to a prompt I had given, and again the phrase rings out in the same ridiculing, drawn-out tone: “Good boy!”. Later that same day, I thank a pupil for returning a pen they borrowed in lesson, and predictably, a voice rises above the indistinguishable chatter: “Good boy!”. The words land with a smirk, not as praise but as ridicule. They turn moments of eagerness or kindness by students into moments of mockery.

I teach in an international school, where most of my students are Egyptian, but their cultural reference points often stretch far beyond local references. As a reluctant consumer of social media, I recently happened to trace back the “Good boy!” phrase to its source. As it turns out, it’s origin is a meme carried out by London influencers. In a series of viral videos, the would-be agitators confront police officers and, after requesting their name and badge number, dismiss them with the same two words: “Good boy!”.

Courtesy of Zoom Discover

What strikes me is not necessarily the irony of the phrase, but the journey it takes to become an utterance I hear daily. A video recorded on a London street finds itself echoing in a school, on a completely different continent, to manipulate student behaviour and classroom dynamics in ways it was never initially intended. It is cultural transmission in an accelerated form and demonstrates how global flows of media are consumed and reshaped. It exemplifies how internet culture seeps into school life. This echo of a meme, ringing out in classrooms, demonstrates the strange routes through which culture now travels.

Memes as Cultural Transmission

The viral journey of the “Good boy!” phrase illustrates what Richard Dawkins coined in 1976 as a “meme”. He used the term to describe cultural units of transmission; self-replicating chunks of information that reproduce like genes. Social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram supercharge this process. However in the present day, memes do not trickle from person to person in small niche corners of the internet; they flood across continents as a part of a new mainstream.

The “Good boy” meme illustrates how meaning mutates in the process. In London, it mocks the authority of the police who comply when obliged to provide their name and badge number; in Cairo, it is used to mock students who comply when obliged to follow a teacher’s requests. Examining how the meme’s meaning shifts across contexts reveals how cultural forms evolve when detatched from their origin. The meme is about inversion. Where “good boy” was once a reward for obedience, it has become a way to ridicule compliance. A student who follows instructions or earns praise is no longer congratulated; they are belittled. This reversal gives the phrase currency among peers for whoever utters it. Both cases represent different forms of resistance to authority, and the effort to undermine structures of power within different social contexts. It allows students to resist authority with humour rather than confrontation. At the same time, it builds identity: those who know the meme belong to an in-group, while those who don’t (often teachers) are left out. The phrase becomes a marker of belonging as much as defiance. Repeating it becomes a mark of status as a rebel. It is like an evolved form folklore; characteristic of the digital age: a phrase which is detached from its origin, and then reattached within a new context, and repurposed for a fresh act of defiance.

Global Flows of Media and School Implications

Online digital media like TikTok shrink geographical boundaries. What might once have remained a local joke in London now surfaces days, weeks, or months later in a classroom on the other side of the world. A teenager in Cairo can reference the same phrase as a teenager in London or Melbourne, and both will laugh. This demonstrates the strange geography of digital youth culture. Globalisation brings students closer to their peers abroad than to the adults in their immediate environment. Their cultural reference points are less local and more global, and all are tied together by algorithms.

This globalisation of online humour has visible effects inside classrooms. Praise was once a teacher’s most reliable tool for motivation, now it can be undercut with two words. The economy of reward and discipline is undermined when authority can be instantly ironicised. However, this is not entirely new. Students have always mocked their teachers, invented slang, or whispered jokes at the back of class. What is new is the degree of homogenisation of global culture, as well as the speed and scale at which it is happens. TikTok takes a local form of agitation and resistance in London, and turns it into a form of defiance available to adopt by anyone with a phone.

The Hidden Curriculum and New Forms of Literacy

Sociologists talk about the “hidden curriculum” which exists within schools. This encompasses the implicit, unspoken lessons students learn from their school environment about hierarchy, how to behave, and the social norms we are expected to fulfil beyond our years of formal education. The routines of daily school life are critiqued as teaching students about their role and position in society; imposing order, competition, and by implication, hierarchy. Traditional conceptions of the hidden curriculum conceive it as a mechanism which props up societal authority. What this suggests is that memes don’t just circulate culture; they also have an educational function. The memes which are consumed and transmitted among students form another part of the hidden curriculum. In group chats and corridors, memes act as an unofficial syllabus of status and power; who deserves respect within the group, who is a comedian, who is a rebel, and how authority can be undermined. They shape the moral education of students in ways that the syllabus can never touch upon. However, the way they are consumed and repeated; especially in the case of the ‘Good boy!’ meme; demonstrates that students aren’t passively defined by the structures of their environment. It exemplifies how students do not simply comply passively to structural impositions, they also resist.

To use memes is to practice a form of literacy. Students decode layers of references through combinations of text, image, and sound, and understand the irony which is compressed into the few short seconds of a social media reel. They acquire this fluency without instruction, through immersion in online youth culture. Viewing this as an adult without a full grasp of the semantics might lead you to think these arrangements are a complete nonsense; nothing more than a confusion of random images and sound effects. However, for educators, it is sensible to question whether we should invest the time and learn to ‘read’ this language. This isn’t a suggestion that we should attempt to copy slang or chase the latest trends, but instead recognise that memes are today’s equivalent of satire consumed en masse. They are compressed cultural texts that carry meaning; and they shape our students behaviour on a global scale. So, by implication, are they not worth unpicking?

This brings us to the question of what this means for teaching itself. If memes like “Good boy!” shape [mis]behaviour in this way, what can it inform us about how we approach the classroom? As educators we rightly see it as our responsibility to equip students with the tools to think critically, and solve problems through engaging with the cultural and intellectual traditions that have shaped and continue to shape wider society. As a literature teacher, I aim, sometimes in vain, to enthuse students with the passion to want to study Shakespeare. Academic literacy and deep analytical skills remain essential, but so too is an awareness of the landscape our students inhabit. To bridge the gap between formal learning and real-life experience, there should at least be a degree of recognition about where young people are starting from, and the ways they are well-practiced in making meaning. Disparaging distinctions between forms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture lack objectivity, and prevent educators from understanding how best to engage and scaffold learning. Our goal should be to build bridges, not knock them down.

Critical Literacy in the Digital Age

When I went through secondary schooling in the early 2000s, part of our GCSE English Language studies involved dissecting bias in different textual forms; comparing broadsheets with tabloids, analysing how headlines shape perception, and identifying the various subtle cues that distinguish fact from persuasion. We were essentially learning to identify power and motive through language. Those exercises equipped us to navigate a media landscape that was largely textual, linear, and slow. Today, the world of media has shifted. The same critical literacy we once applied to newspaper columns must now be applied to the new multimodal forms of media which are part of the mainstream, where misinformation spreads not only through textual arguments in the traditional press but through images, sound, and humour.

Widely considered as a form of ‘low culture’, memes are rarely afforded analytical attention within formal education. The hierarchy of cultural value means that our classrooms still prioritise old forms of media. Traditional textual modes such as essays and poems are prioritised by curriculum designers, and all the while the digital image; the medium through which many young people now encounter politics, identity, and truth; remains unexamined. What began as a joke in a classroom - two words used to undercut praise - is the same mechanism which is at work in the wider world, reshapes meaning and challenges authority wherever it lands. This does not mean memes should become a subject in themselves, but that the cognitive tools to read them critically must be carefully embedded into education. Students need to practise the same habits of questioning that were once applied to headlines or adverts: Who made this? What perspective does it reflect? How does it seek to influence me? What values does it transmit? Why has it spread so quickly? These questions are transferable across media forms, and are just as relevant to a TikTok clip or viral meme as to a front-page story.

To ignore new literacies is to concede their power to those who wield them. Embedding the ability for students to decode this form of media is not about endorsement of their often reductive and corrosive messages, but recognition of their influence. Just as previous generations learned to question political cartoons, advertising slogans, and tabloid headlines, today’s students must learn to read digital culture critically. If the goal of education is to cultivate critical thinkers capable of discerning truth from manipulation, then these skills, which are transferable across both traditional and digital forms, belong squarely within that mission. Memes may appear trivial, but the ways they shape meaning, identity, and authority are not. To equip students with the tools to recognise this is not an overreach, but a necessary part of preparing them to read the world they already inhabit.

Jamie Dinler

MA Education student at UCL, and Secondary IGCSE Teacher.

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