The Hypocrisy of Training Teachers to Breathe While the System Breaks Them

First we blamed the kids. Now we blame the teachers.

A growing trend in professional development focuses on “neuroscience,” urging educators to regulate their own nervous systems. The promise is that calm, grounded teachers will create calmer classrooms. It sounds supportive, even progressive. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about fixing classrooms. It’s about shifting responsibility onto teachers while the system refuses to change.

But let’s be honest, this is a deflection.

When schools offer nervous system regulation training to educators, it is framed as a solution to dysregulated classrooms. But it quietly shifts the responsibility back onto individual teachers to cope with impossible conditions, rather than addressing the systemic reasons why both educators and students are struggling.

It is yet another form of victim blaming.

Instead of confronting underfunding, chronic staffing shortages, inequitable policies, or the lack of meaningful support for students with complex needs, the system says: you just need to regulate yourself more. Instead of addressing the trauma, poverty, and exclusion that leave students dysregulated, educators are told to breathe, pause, and “stay calm” while those root causes remain untouched.

And here’s another uncomfortable truth: teachers who do not understand human rights, equity, and ableism will not suddenly become more inclusive simply because they have learned to regulate their nervous system. If a teacher views disability through a deficit lens, ignores systemic barriers, or fails to recognize how exclusion and discrimination show up in schools, then no amount of breathing exercises or calming strategies will change the way they treat students who are already marginalized. Inclusion requires more than personal calm; it requires a commitment to justice, equity, and the dismantling of ableist practices.

But even if that foundation is in place, something else is still missing. Teachers who lack an understanding of neuroscience overlook another critical truth: the brain is shaped by relationships, safety, autonomy, and choice. Regulation does not happen in isolation; it happens through co-regulation within safe, attuned relationships. Without recognizing the role of attachment, trust, and true belonging in shaping how children learn and cope, regulation initiatives risk becoming superficial gestures rather than meaningful change. And this is made even harder in a fast-paced, outcome-based education system that rarely allows us to slow down, connect, and simply be with students as they are. A student’s nervous system cannot be soothed by a teacher who is calm but disconnected; it can only find stability through genuine human connection, freedom to be themselves, and spaces where belonging is not conditional but real.

Worse yet, it feels like a slap in the face to the teachers who are in the trenches every day, fighting for inclusion and equity with limited support. Meanwhile, those who continue to exclude and marginalize students get a free pass, with no accountability and no push to confront systemic harm or reflect on their own biases. They simply receive another layer of training that allows them to carry on as before.

Meanwhile, teachers are expected to co-regulate students without being regulated themselves. They’re told to regulate in an environment that is intentionally dysregulating, with high workloads, unrealistic expectations, little autonomy, and constant systemic pressure. What’s missing is not just personal resilience, but systemic support and professional learning grounded in human rights. Teachers need education on equity, ableism, and the legal protections students are entitled to, so they understand that exclusion and discrimination are not “challenges to manage” but violations to address. Without this foundation, regulation training is reduced to coping strategies that keep teachers quiet in the face of systemic harm, instead of empowering them to advocate for change.

This kind of training becomes a smokescreen. It suggests the problem lies in the response to stress, not the cause of the stress. It protects the system by making teachers feel personally responsible for managing the unmanageable. It erases the need to fix the actual conditions harming both educators and students.

It is not that educators don’t deserve tools for their own well-being. They absolutely do. But nervous system regulation training, offered without systemic change, is just a Band-Aid. It keeps teachers functional enough to endure a broken system without ever addressing the harm that system creates.

It does nothing to bring more support staff into classrooms.
It does nothing to reduce exclusion, inequity, or the structural trauma inflicted on students.
It does nothing to change policies that prioritize compliance over connection.

Regulation training, without systemic change, is meaningless.

Teachers are not the problem.
Students are not the problem.
The system is.