When I was in grade three, I attended an alternative school that felt like a sun-dappled meadow. We painted. We played outside. We had a math teacher who made learning feel like a game, not a test. There was room to breathe. I remember it as freedom.
Then, in grade four, everything changed. My new school was stricter—tighter, colder, more silent. My teacher ruled the classroom with a voice like a snapping twig. Something in me shrank. I became watchful, then fearful. Not just of making mistakes, but of what might happen if I did.
The playground gave this fear a name. Across the road stood a private school, its students separated from us by a street but wrapped in stories that leapt the divide. I heard whispers of punishments there—children getting strapped, or hit with rulers across the knuckles. I never saw it. I didn’t need to. The story alone was enough. After that, I was convinced my own teacher might do the same. I lived in dread. I nearly wet myself at my desk more times than I can count.
That fear wasn’t rational. It wasn’t based on anything real in my classroom—only the stories that circulated among children like survival manuals. But in some ways, it was real. Because I wasn’t safe. Not because anyone ever raised a ruler, but because I knew I didn’t belong. My teacher didn’t understand me. I wasn’t seen. I wasn’t believed. I was already being harmed—quietly, pervasively, and officially.
When parent-teacher interviews came, that harm was confirmed. My teacher told my mother I was not a good student. Not bright. Not capable. My mother—who knew I was gifted, complex, extraordinary—was furious. And she did something radical. She withdrew me from school. She brought me home.
That decision saved my life.
Because it interrupted the story
Because it told me another one: that I was not the problem. That the system’s judgment was not truth. That fear could be answered with protection. That I was worth listening to—and worth fighting for.
How stories shape behaviour
What strikes me now is how deeply that playground rumour governed my behaviour. I sat still because I feared the strap. I obeyed not because it felt right, but because my nervous system told me that defiance meant violence. The imagined punishment changed how I moved through the world.
This is what social stories do. Especially in childhood—especially in institutions—we look to others, and to the whispers around us, to understand what is safe. What is allowed. Who gets punished, and who gets away with things. These aren’t always explicit lessons. Sometimes they come from stories told in hushed tones or giggles or warnings: don’t go to that teacher, don’t talk back in that class, they’ll call your mom, they’ll suspend you, they’ll hurt you.
Sometimes the fear is misplaced. But the response is rational.
Children construct their moral and behavioural universes from the cues around them—cues that are cultural, narrative, and deeply social. When the stories in circulation are fear-based, punitive, or shaming, children internalise those frameworks. Not just about the teacher across the hall—but about themselves.
An alternate story
What my mother gave me was a counter-story. She saw that I was not thriving, and she listened to the signals I gave—my terror, my withdrawal, the way my body braced against the school day. She listened, and she acted.
And by acting, she taught me something different. She showed me that systems can be wrong. That harm can be interrupted. That not every adult is an authority worth believing. And that I was, in the final account, worth protecting.
Why this matters now
I tell this story not just because it’s mine, but because so many children today are still living within harmful educational narratives. The stories they hear on the playground—about suspension, restraint, isolation rooms—are often horrifyingly true. Others, like mine, may be exaggerated or misapplied, but still speak to something deeper: the instability of trust. The precarity of belonging.
When we talk about school safety, we often think in physical terms. But emotional safety—psychological safety—is built on story. It’s built on what children believe will happen to them if they falter, question, speak up, or simply exist as themselves.
And if we want to build schools that nurture rather than punish, we must pay attention to those stories. We must ask what children are hearing, what they are fearing, and what they believe will happen when they ask for help. Or when they don’t.
Because the stories we tell—formally and informally, in policy and in whispers—shape everything.
End collective punishment in BC schools
No child should be punished for another’s behaviour.
Children know from a very young age that this is wrong.
We call on the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care to end collective punishment in BC Schools.
