Hope, Healing, and Other Things Schools Cannot Provide

There is a quiet but dangerous lie embedded in modern education.

It sounds compassionate. Progressive, even.

Schools, we are told, are places of hope. Places that heal trauma. They must repair what society has broken. They must meet every emotional, psychological, and relational need a child arrives with, often without the resources, training, time, or structural ability to do so.

This narrative does not uplift children.
It absolves systems.

Hope and healing are not services that can be delivered through an IEP, a behaviour plan, or a classroom strategy. They are not outcomes that can be measured, tracked, or scheduled into a timetable. And when schools are positioned as responsible for providing them, something crucial is lost, accountability for the conditions that made them necessary in the first place.

Too often, hope is offered where accountability should be.
When a child is excluded again, families are told to stay hopeful.
When supports are delayed, reduced, or quietly removed, hope is offered instead.
When parents raise concerns about harm, they are met with optimism rather than change.

Hope becomes a soft language used to buffer hard truths.

That staffing is insufficient.
That training is inadequate.
That inclusion exists more in policy than in practice.
That some children are simply too inconvenient for the system to serve well.

Hope is not neutral when it is used this way. It becomes a deflection, a way to soothe without repairing, to pacify without transforming. It asks families to emotionally carry what systems refuse to structurally address.

The Burden We Place on Schools and Children

Public schools were never designed to heal social harm. They were designed to educate within a narrow, industrial framework, one that rewards compliance, standardization, and productivity. Over time, as social safety nets frayed and community supports eroded, schools became the last remaining public institution standing.

So we asked them to do more.

Much more.

We asked them to address poverty, racism, ableism, family violence, housing instability, food insecurity, colonial harm, and mental health crises, without changing the structures that reproduce those harms. We asked teachers to become counsellors, therapists, crisis responders, and social workers, often while managing overcrowded classrooms and shrinking supports.

And when schools inevitably failed to “fix” children shaped by these conditions, we turned our gaze toward the child instead.

They are dysregulated.
They are oppositional.
They lack resilience.
They need intervention.

The problem was never a lack of hope inside the child.
It was a lack of justice around them.

Healing Cannot Occur in Harmful Conditions

Healing requires safety.
Safety requires predictability.
Predictability requires trust.

Schools, as they currently function, often cannot offer any of these consistently, especially to disabled students, racialized students, Indigenous students, and those living at the intersections of multiple forms of marginalization.

A child cannot heal in a system where their access to support depends on budgets, staffing shortages, or whether an adult believes them. They cannot heal when accommodations are framed as favors rather than rights, or when their distress is managed through exclusion, restraint, or quiet removal from the classroom.

You cannot heal while being surveilled.
You cannot heal while being punished for your nervous system.
You cannot heal while being told, explicitly or implicitly, that you are the problem.

When schools are tasked with healing without first dismantling the conditions of harm, what they often deliver instead is control.

Schools may claim to be healing spaces, but without a fundamental shift in how power operates within them, what they offer is not healing. It is optics.

This is not hope.
This is attrition.

And children feel it.

They learn early whether their needs are welcome or inconvenient, whether their differences are accommodated or merely tolerated, whether they must contort themselves to belong. No amount of positive messaging can undo the lessons taught through repeated exclusion.

Hope Is Not a Curriculum Outcome

Hope does not come from motivational posters or social-emotional lessons. It does not come from teaching children to “self-regulate” in environments that continually overwhelm them. And it certainly does not come from telling families to trust systems that have repeatedly failed them.

Hope emerges when children experience themselves as valued, believed, and protected.

Hope emerges when barriers are removed, not when children are taught to tolerate them.

Hope emerges when adults take responsibility for changing the environment instead of asking children to adapt endlessly to systems that were never built for them.

This is why so many families feel a deep dissonance when schools speak the language of care while operating within structures of harm. The words sound right.
The reality does not align.

What Schools Can Do

This is not an argument for abandoning schools. It is an argument for honesty.

Schools cannot provide healing, but they can stop causing harm.

They can stop framing disability as deficit.
They can stop using behaviour as a proxy for unmet needs.
They can stop excluding children under the guise of “support.”
They can stop shifting responsibility onto families while quietly reducing services.

They can stop offering hope in place of action.

Schools can be places where harm is not compounded.
Places where dignity is upheld.
Places where children are not required to earn their right to belong.

That work is not therapeutic.
It is structural.
It is political.
It is a matter of rights.

The Cost of the Illusion

When we pretend schools can heal without systemic change, we set everyone up to fail.

Teachers burn out under impossible expectations.
Families internalize shame when nothing improves.
Children learn that their pain is something to manage quietly rather than something that matters.

Most dangerously, systems avoid accountability. Because if schools are framed as the place where healing should occur, then the broader social, economic, and political structures that produce harm remain untouched.

Hope becomes a distraction.
Healing becomes a deflection.

A Different Kind of Responsibility

What children need is not for schools to save them.

They need schools to stand with them.

To name harm when it exists.
To refuse practices that exclude, punish, or erase.
To work in partnership with families rather than in defense of liability.
To recognize that education cannot be separated from justice.

Hope is not something schools can provide, but they can create the conditions where it becomes possible.

And that begins not with another program, framework, or initiative, but with the courage to stop pretending that care can exist without action.