Identity, Community, and the Messes We Make: An Exploratory Series — Part 3

Psychological Violence Against Children in Schools

by Jeff Bloom

Almost all of us have spent a considerable amount of time in school, unless we have been home-schooled or have avoided attending school. For me, the first seven years (through grade 6) were  less than pleasant. In grade 2, the principal spanked me… I didn’t cry… for not paying attention in the classroom. Personally, I found school pretty boring and spent a good deal of time gazing out the windows and daydreaming. Much of the rest of the time, I and a number of other children drew designs of bomb shelters, which was in response to a major political assault on children during the Cold War. And, corporal punishment was still legal in schools, although I’m sure my Mom’s response pushed the banning of corporal punishment forward. Shortly after I was spanked, the principal spanked (“the”) Reggie Jackson for taking the school bus to school, because he lived just inside the line of who could and couldn’t take the bus. But, Reggie’s response was much more direct and courageous than mine. He just hit her back. His punishment for that was that he had to walk to school. The children from wealthier families, of which there were many, never incurred the physical violence of the teachers, although psychological violence is another story, which we’ll get to shortly.

Then, in junior high school we had a math teacher who’d stab kids in the shoulders with a pencil, if they misbehaved, and a shop teacher who’d take a short piece of wood, make a student, who made a mistake on any particular machine, lean over on the machine and get swatted. These teachers had reason to target me, but they never did. And, I assume they didn’t target Reggie, who was beginning to gain local fame for his extraordinary athletic abilities in track and field, football, baseball, and basketball.

Since then, physical violence against students by teachers and administrators has decreased, but the threat and actual occurrence of much more deadly violence has increased. Many children, and their parents, have at least a background fear of going to school. Some familiar face of a present or former student who has been marginalized by teachers and other students, may charge in with automatic weapons and start shooting. Or, the same could occur by some stranger with an unknown grudge or pathological ideal to kill unknown children and adults. 

Physical violence causes psychological violence, as well. Depending upon the nature of the physical violence, the resulting psychological impacts can be severe and long-lasting for the victim and the victim’s family and friends, and, in some cases, people beyond the immediate area. The shootings in schools, places of worship, and other public spaces have had wide-ranging impacts on the whole society, at least among people who have some semblance of empathy and caring for others. We are, as a society, losing our empathy and our caring about and for others, due in no small part by the onslaught of violent messages and depictions by politicians, on TV series, in movies, on news reports, in more violent sports, and on social media. We are becoming uncomfortably numb, to play off of Pink Floyd’s song “Comfortably Numb.” 

On top of that, we are subjected to various forms of psychological violence. Each of these forms of violence is like a blanket with various sizes of pins sticking out. And, these blankets of violence are piled on top of children in school, as well as for some, at home; in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques; in sports teams, clubs, and other recreational activities; in their neighborhoods by other children and adults; and now on social media. These blankets of psychological violence are often invisible, and even thought of as just “the way life is.” Such forms of violence are insidious and creep into all aspects of our lives in school and other contexts. Even the purveyors of psychological violence don’t always “see” that what they are doing is abusive or violent. 

I went through elementary school with a boy, who may have been the smartest and most intelligent person, child or adult, in the school. We were both outcasts, for different reasons. I was a skinny, shy little boy, and Fred (a pseudonym) was a chubby, awkward boy. We often went over each others’ house after school to play. In the classroom, he often would raise his hand in the middle of the teacher trying to explain some concept to the class. The teacher would stop and say something like, “Yes, Fred?” Fred would then go into a long explanation of the concept she (all the classroom teachers were women) was explaining incorrectly. Fred’s corrections were not a rare occurrence, but would happen at least once a day. The teachers always dismissed his explanations with great irritation. He, as I did by association as well as my own quirks, became targets for the classroom bullies.

Layers of Psychological Violence

Curiously, one of the core, underlying layers that set up the dynamic of psychological violence is a pattern of layers called hierarchy. Hierarchies occur to some extent in the natural world. There is a hierarchy of energy in ecosystems, where the most energy available from a certain amount of a food source is at the bottom of the hierarchy, which is occupied by plants. The next level of energy are those organisms that eat plants (herbivores). For each step up the hierarchy, some energy is lost through the energy expenditure for eating and digesting food. The hierarchy continues upwards with corresponding reductions in available energy as one type of organism eats other organisms. In natural hierarchies, one layer is not particularly better or more powerful than any other layer. However, the hierarchies that are developed by and manifest in most human societies are not so equitable. The top of human hierarchies are the most important and most powerful people. As we proceed downward, each layer is less important and less powerful and always “answer” to the layers above. Hierarchies seem to be the default organizational scheme in our societies. The entire education system is hierarchical. Almost all religious organizations are hierarchical. Almost all businesses and giant corporations are hierarchical. Athletic teams are hierarchical. Non-profit organizations are hierarchical. Street gangs are hierarchical. Organized crime syndicates are hierarchical. And, all levels of government and their various agencies are hierarchical; and this applies equally to democratic and authoritarian governments. Although there are distinct differences between the two governing patterns, or at least there should be. Hierarchies are so common and widespread, most of us think that this is just the way it is and the way it should be, with no vision of other possibilities. 

However, many indigenous societies of the past and the few that have managed to maintain their integrity had what I have been calling holarchic organizational schemes. Holarchies, a term coined by Arthur Koestler [[1]], are embedded rather than stacked layers like hierarchies. The layers of the Earth, the petals of a rose, the layers of a hard boiled or raw egg, and, possibly, democracy in its purest sense are holarchies. I’ve used the metaphor of holarchy to discuss how classrooms are and can be created as democratic communities of knowledge producers. I’ve chosen those words with some care. “Democracy” can be tricky, because of the assumptions and baggage associated with the term. But, essentially such classroom communities distribute power, control, and decision-making. Much of this sense of classroom community is based on the work of Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, and Barbara Rogoff.[[2]] Such communities in classrooms are to some degree based on how many, but not all, apprenticeships manifest. If you imagine a holarchy as a set of concentric circles, the mentor is in the center as the model and source of knowledge or “full participant” in the community. Apprentices are distributed among the other layers. They work their way towards the center as they learn and perfect their skills. Similarly, a democratic classroom community can be envisioned in a similar way, but with some differences. The teacher is at the center, but can move across layers of participation. And, students can be distributed across layers including the center. 

My favorite example is of a classroom I visited a number of years ago. This 4th grade classroom was in a public elementary school in an urban setting. I showed up at the school about 45-minutes before school started and was met by the teacher, who I will call Sandy, who escorted me upstairs to her classroom. There were already a few students in room. And, more students arrived gradually. As they waited for the school day to begin, the children in the room looked at long-term experiments they were conducting, read books, sat in groups talking, or played board games. As the time to begin the day approached, the children started gathering and sitting on a carpeted area of the room where they met for whole group activities and discussions. At one point, Sandy walked by getting things ready for the day, and said, “I heard you didn’t have a substitute yesterday. What did you guys do?” After a moment, one girl said, “After a while we figured you weren’t coming, so I took the attendance and took it down to the office. Then, when I got back, we talked about it, and decided to keep reading [a book they had been reading]. We took turns reading aloud, and then we discussed it.” Sandy responded with her hands on her hips, “Well, what do you need me for!” The children spent the rest of the day without Sandy continuing to do the things they had done the day before. The principal came in occasionally to check on how they were doing and other teachers kept an eye and ear out for anything out of the ordinary, but nothing other than the continuation of class as normal occurred. The whole day I spent there was equally remarkable and inspiring. However, as Sandy noted, had a substitute been mistakenly cancelled in October, the result would have been total chaos. But, this was March, and her diligent work at creating a classroom community had been manifesting for a while. Her presence was not an absolute necessity. 

What I like about this example is how the children “owned” the classroom community. When the teacher was not there, they just continued as usual. It was their community, why would they destroy it? As in any group of people, there were children who didn’t move from peripheral layers of participation to the center when Sandy was absent, but they weren’t marginalized. It was still their classroom; they just didn’t want to or feel like moving into the center. But, everyone participated in all of the activities. 

Another meta-layer of psychological violence that intertwines with hierarchies, is systemic psychological violence. Epp [[3]] describes systemic psychological violence as, “… any institutional practice or procedure that adversely impacts … individuals or groups by burdening them psychologically, mentally, culturally, spiritually, economically, or physically…. rhat prevent students from learning.” Once you start looking for examples of this sort of systemic violence, you fall into a rabbit hole of enormous proportions. Here are just a few examples:

• High stakes testing — Tests, especially multiple choice, fill in the blank, and true or false type tests, don’t “measure” much of anything except test-taking ability. Learning has no measurable qualities or dimensions. What a person actually understands goes way beyond what a test can access. And, then we make tests into these monolithic indicators of one’s knowledge, intelligence, abilities, and so forth. The results of tests can impact students’ entire lives and limit the possibilities of what any individual might like to pursue. And, tests are notoriously biased culturally and socio-economically, not to mention the diversity of individual characteristics that can affect test-taking. Some children are put under incredible amounts of pressure and stress to do “well” on tests. Test taking favors memorizing abilities, and some children, like I was and still am, are not good at memorizing. Some children may have learning disabilities, even though they may be perfectly intelligent, but just can’t perform well on tests. 
• Grouping by “ability” — Testing is used to categorize children by ability. Some schools separate these into specific tracks or programs based on test scores. In my junior high school they used non-sequential letters to identify the tracks while thinking it would hide which tracks were the most “intelligent” and “dumbest.” Of course, all the students knew who they were. Categorizing, labelling, and determining the future of children can be life changing acts of psychological violence. 
• School and classroom written and unwritten rules, curriculums, assumptions, and expectations — All of these different aspects that are standard components of the institution of schooling are based on a few fundamental assumptions about children, such as, children cannot be trusted, children are not really completely human and are incapable of being thoughtful decision-makers and learners, children have nothing of value to offer, and so forth. All of the rules are based on these assumptions. Elementary school students have to walk in lines when they go as a class to the cafeteria or to another class. Children has to call their teachers by “Mr.” or “Ms.” as signs of respect. The list of these rules is extensive. Curriculums are based on someone else’s idea of what must be learned, how it must be learned, and how quickly it must be learned. “Efficiency” is the priority. Move quickly through texts and the curriculum even if students don’t understand the material. All control is in the hands of others. Students are seen as second class “citizens” with little to offer the dynamics of learning and schooling.   

On the first day of the school year in one of my K-12 teaching positions, I was teaching a 4th—5th grade class. The bell rang for lunch. I walked over to the door and stood there. After a few seconds a couple of the children asked, “do you want us to get in a line?” I responded with another question, “Do you think we can make into the cafeteria without walking in a line?” In unison, they all said, “yes.” Amazingly, we all made into the cafeteria in one piece with no missing children. Several months into the second year along with a new principal and with a new group of 4th and 5th graders, we continued making it to the cafeteria without standing in line. However, one day, the principal got on the intercom to make some announcements to the whole elementary school. But, the announcements were actually edicts. The major edict went something like this (paraphrased): “I am finding that the cafeteria is way too noisy. From now on I expect absolute silence in the cafeteria. The quietest class will get a reward.” Later that morning, the lunch bell rang. We walked to the cafeteria and sat down around “our” table with our food. After about 30 seconds of dead silence two girls asked, in a whisper, “Do we have to not talk?” I whispered back to the whole class, “Do you want to get the reward?” In unison, the class whispered back, “No.” So we all talked, and never got an award.

These two episodes bring to the forefront a set of patterns that send messages and metamessages about how children are viewed, how they are to be treated, and the nature of the schooling context. The same sorts of messages appear in all aspects of our institution of schooling and how education is talked about and portrayed in the media. The messages and metamessages not only are characteristic of authoritarian, but also are dehumanizing, marginalizing, and trivializing children. And, these patterns of communication have a huge impact on children’s and many teachers’ identities and on how children see themselves and others. 

Jay Lemke and many other educators and researchers [[4]] view such messages and metamessages through a lens of semiotics. Semiotics is basically the study of signs or symbols that manifest in talk, writing, objects, settings, body language, and so forth. Contemporary school buildings themselves communicate a great deal about what they represent and what occurs inside. New buildings have no windows, or at best small windows, which are often near the ceiling and only extending down about two feet or less. Many schools are surrounded by high walls or fences. From the outside, they appear much like prisons. Inside the schools, the direct communication and metacommunication can vary from a superficial glitziness that attempts to hide the underlying messages to a dreary, shoddy, and depressing atmosphere not all that different from prisons. 

Inside of schools and classrooms, the metamessages abound. The following is a list of some common examples of messages and symbols that have negative psychological effects on children and teachers. 

• Teacher’s desk at front of room with student desks in rows, facing the front of the classroom. This is the traditional sign that the teacher is the authority and that students must pay attention to and obey the teacher.
• Walls of classroom, if anything is on them, are uniformly bland in color and adorned with posters and other materials that have been chosen by the teacher. These materials are mostly from the educational publishing corporations. 
• Newer school buildings have no windows or small windows high on the walls so all you can see is sky. All student attention must be focused on the teacher and the tasks they are mandated to do, sitting under artificial light while the sun shines.
• Teachers’ lesson plans often have to be posted on the outside of the classroom door, so that the principal and other administrative staff can see what is supposed to be happening and can compare that to what the teacher is actually doing in the classroom at any particular time. Efficiency and obeying the mandated topic and timeline are not in the hands of the teacher, and certainly not in the hands of the children. 
• Selection of books and reading material in classrooms are not determined by the teacher, but by higher authorities with political ties. 
• “Raising Standards” sounds good, but manifests as another way to justify the dumbing down of children. These “higher” standards lead to further fragmentation of knowledge, pushing children into various tracks or “classes” of individuals, and further decontextualizing the information to be learned. More content to be learned actually decreases the depth and extent of learning. 

There is also a wide assortment of documents and direct communications that are completely misleading and often just fictitious. Teachers and schools will often state explicitly that they want students to be independent thinkers and learners, to develop responsibility, to care about one another, to be good democratic citizens, to develop critical thinking skills, to be creative, and so forth. Yet, if students ask critical questions they are dismissed or marked down in graded assignments. The same sort of thing happens with students’ creative expression, which may even lead to disciplinary actions. There is nothing about the running of almost all schools that is in any way democratic. In fact, we are hard pressed to find any context that resembles a democracy anywhere in our social worlds. If students act in ways that demonstrate a sense of responsibility, they will most likely be reprimanded or disciplined. 

Schooling and Identity

Between the ages of 5 and 18, we spend about a third of our lives in school or doing homework. The most expansive and thorough learning that occurs during our time in school is who we are and how we must act in authoritarian contexts. We learn how to not question and to obey authorities — teachers, principals, security guards, and other adults. We learn how to conform to expectations of these adults. We learn how to be nice, little, compliant children pretending to be mini-adults. We learn to be dependent on these adults. We learn that we can’t be trusted. We learn that we can’t take on responsible roles. Outside of school, many families, who’ve been “processed” in the same way, continue the process of authoritarian patterns within the home. It is no wonder that people have been so willing to accept authoritarianism in local and national political contexts. It has been what we’ve been brainwashed to accept. Our identities have been molded to include being subservient to those in authority. There are, of course, exceptions, throughout the generations. In my lifetime, it was the Beat generation, followed by the Hippies, and a few decades later, the Goths. These were the people who refused to be co-opted, and to assert their individuality, but which also was part of a new group identity. We are social beings. We do want both individual and group identities.

Peter was a middle school student of mine, when I was teaching science in an urban public school. As a teacher, I was still struggling to find my footing and orientation on how to deal with classroom behavior. Well, Peter was always disrupting the class, mostly with jokes and dramatic outbursts. He was a nice kid, but very challenging for a fairly novice teacher. One day, I had enough, and told him to come out into the hall to talk. I asked him why he was always disrupting the class. And, he responded, “everyone expects me to be funny. I just have to do it.” That was my first lesson in social identity. We came to an agreement that suited both of us, and returned to the classroom.

John Gatto described the characteristics of his high school students’ identities as pathological in the sense of not being particularly healthful or beneficial to their psychosocial well-being:

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. 
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity. 
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future. 
4. The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present….
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. [Does this sound familiar?]
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically “grade everything”….
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges.[[5]]

Gatto published this material in 1992. The dawn of the Internet era had just begun. There were no cell phones. Since then, we might ponder what changes have taken place and how have they impacted the psychosocial well-being of students. When I was doing my undergraduate work +/- 1970, students would gather outside on campus, in the student center, or in people’s rooms to talk, share ideas, pass on the titles of good books, and discuss the psychological, social, and political issues of the time. Now, students walk or sit on benches with smartphones glued to their faces. Communication and relationships are dying.

Some other features of identities that are impacted to one degree or another by experiences in schools and classrooms, include: 

• Far too many students see themselves as failures.
• Far too many students see themselves as just cogs in the wheel of a techno-industrial society.
• Far too many students see themselves as marginalized and disliked.
• Far too many students leave school lacking self-confidence.
• Far too many students leave school lacking any kind of passion or interest in something other than fleeting desires or materialistic fluff. 
• Far too many students leave school thinking they are not smart or intelligent, not creative, not decision-makers, not good writers, not good artists, and not good at arithmetic/math.
• Self as incapable of controlling one’s own life.
• Far too many students leave school with no love for reading, exploring, learning, etc.
• Far too many students leave school with no appreciation for the arts and creative works of others.
• We all have left school with shallow, fragmented, and disconnected knowledge devoid of any context, meaning, or relevance. 
• Students spend their time in school going through the motions; doing just the minimum needed to get an “A” or to just pass. 
• There is a deep-seated loneliness, isolation, and disconnection from our natural and social worlds underlying everything students do. 
• Metaphorically, far too many children are being turned into zombies, just like the adults in their worlds.

RECOMMENDED READINGS (some cited and some not cited in this essay)

Alan A. Block’s (1997). I’m only bleeding: Education as the practice of violence against children. New York: Peter Lang. — A penetrating and chilling examination of how the institution of education has created and perpetuated schooling that promotes psychological violence upon children. 

Ed Cairns’ (1996). Children and Political Violence (Understanding Children’s Worlds) (1st ed.). Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. — A thorough examination of the contexts involved in the effects of politics on children, as well as how children are involved in politics and political action. 

Martin Carnoy’s (1974) Education as Cultural Imperialism. New York: Longman. — A classic into how schooling acts as a force to tame the masses and incorporate people into the new hierarchy, which is now emerging as a techno-industrial hierarchy.  

Juanita Ross Epp’s & Ailsa M. Watkinson’s (1996) Systemic Violence: How Schools Hurt Children. New York: Routledge. — A collection of powerful chapters by variety of authors who examine in depth various ways in which schooling negatively impacts children through physical and psychological violence.

Paulo Freire’s (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Publishing Company. — A classic work on politics and education that is both critical and hopeful. 

John Taylor Gatto’s (1990) Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books. — John Gatto’s (a former New York Teacher of the Year) impassioned examination of schooling; and his plea for major changes that give children the dignity, respect, and lives they deserve. Reading this now, you’ll see not only that not much has changed, but also that we now can see clearly the results of a failed institution of education.

Henry Giroux’s (2009). Youth in a suspect society. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. — A concise, but penetrating examination of the fragile place children hold in society and the fragility of democracy itself. 

Alfie Kohn’s (2000). The case against standardized testing: Raising the scores, ruining the schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. — This book is an informed attack on standardized testing, and how such testing is harming children. 

Jonathan Kozol’s (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Harper Perennial. — A heartbreaking and enraging exposé of the stark contrast between wealth and poverty in American schools. 

Jay Lemke’s (1995) Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. — A penetrating exploration of how schools and other institutions use language to exert power and control by affecting personal meanings, beliefs, and views of self and others. 

Return to Series "Introduction & Table of Contents"

NOTES

[[1]] Koestler (1968)

[[2]] Lave (1988); Lave & Wenger (1991); Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett (2001); Wenger (1990)

[[3]] Epp (1996)

[[4]] Bopry (2002); Lemke (1995); Peirce, et al. (1992)

[[5]] Gatto (1992) pages 30-32

REFERENCES

Bopry, J. (2002). Semiotics, Epistemology, and Inquiry. Teaching & Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry and Reflective Practice, 17(1), 5–18.

Epp, J. R. (1996). Schools, complicity, and sources of violence. In J. R. Epp, & A. M. Watkinson (Eds.). Systemic Violence: How Schools Hurt Children (pp. 1—23). New York: Routledge.

Gatto, J. (2001). A different kind of teacher: Solving the crisis of American schooling. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books.

Koestler, A. (1968). The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan.

Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual Politics: Discourse And Social Dynamic. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis.

Peirce, C. S., Houser, N., & loesel, C. J. W. (with Peirce Edition Project). (1992). The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G., & Bartlett, L. (2001). Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

© 2025 by Jeffrey W Bloom

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