Where Is Healing in Our Schools?

We often speak about education as preparation for life. We expect schools to prepare young people to read, write, calculate, reason, communicate, enter university, find employment, pay taxes, function well, and engage in society. Yet there is a strange omission in this preparation—a tying point that weaves the tapestry of education and schooling. Every day we educate children who have experienced grief, migration, racism, family conflict, poverty, violence, loneliness, ecological anxiety, displacement, bullying, discrimination, and countless quieter wounds, but we rarely ask whether education itself should help human beings learn how to live with suffering, repair relationships, reconnect with themselves, and move toward greater wholeness.

When distress becomes visible enough, our usual response is to refer a student to the school counsellor.

School counsellors are really necessary, and I have seen and read the dire need for more school counsellors in North American schools. But having a counsellor in a school is not the same thing as making healing part of education.

What do I mean by healing?

Healing is a process through which a person, community, or living system moves toward greater wholeness after hurt, disconnection, loss, violence, or suffering. It does not necessarily mean returning to who we were before the wound. Some things cannot be undone. Sometimes there is no previous state to which we should want to return.

Healing can instead mean learning how to live differently with what has happened. It means creating enough safety and compassion for pain to be acknowledged, grieved, understood, and gradually woven into a larger story of who we are becoming.

Healing can involve sitting gently with ourselves, listening deeply, remembering, grieving, reflecting, and making meaning. It may involve reconnecting with parts of ourselves that have been silenced, frightened, neglected, or pushed away.

But healing is not only individual. Here I feel I need to draw a clear distinction between “individual” and “person,” although I acknowledge English is not my first language. “Individual” is a solo being in their ego, wrapped with skin and flesh, disconnected from their human connections—an island. A “person” is a human being considered through their connection to themselves and their needs, their family and community, their relationships with nonhuman beings, their past and future, and all aspects of relationality.

We are wounded through relationships, families, communities, histories, institutions, wars, colonization, displacement, racism, economic injustice, and our damaged relationship with the Earth. Consequently, healing can also occur relationally—through trustworthy human relationships, community, culture, ancestors, land, nature, spirituality, art, music, movement, storytelling, justice-seeking, ritual, and meaningful participation in collective life.

This is precisely why healing cannot be assigned only to the counsellor’s office.

The counsellor’s office is necessary—but it is not enough

Imagine a student spends six hours each day in classrooms and perhaps 45 minutes every two weeks with a counsellor. Where is the student’s educational world actually being formed?

In the classroom. In the hallway. At lunch. On the playground.

Through relationships with teachers. Through relationships with peers.

Through the books the student reads. Through what the curriculum remembers and what it forgets.

Through whether the student’s language, family, body, history, community, and culture are treated as sources of knowledge or as obstacles to learning.

A counsellor may help a child cope with anxiety. But what if the classroom itself continuously produces anxiety?

A counsellor may help a racialized student process experiences of exclusion. But what if the curriculum continually presents European knowledge as universal knowledge while treating other traditions as supplementary?

A counsellor may help an Indigenous student with distress. But what if education remains disconnected from land, community, ancestry, and Indigenous ways of knowing?

A counsellor may teach a child breathing exercises. But what if the rest of the school day teaches the child’s body: Sit still. Be quiet. Hurry. Perform. Compete. Don’t fall behind.

We cannot outsource healing to mental-health professionals while leaving the educational environment itself unchanged.

Healing must become part of pedagogy, not merely a service provided when pedagogy fails to hold the whole human being.

Western education’s problem with wholeness

There is a deeper philosophical problem here.

Mainstream Western education has inherited a fragmented understanding of the human being. Mind becomes separated from body. Reason from emotion. Individual from community. Human beings from nature. Academic knowledge from lived experience. And, particularly in secular institutions, intellectual life is often separated from spiritual or existential questions.

The classroom therefore becomes primarily a place for the mind.

Students are asked:

These are valuable questions. I am not proposing that we abandon them.

I am asking why education so rarely adds other questions:

These are also educational questions.

Healing does not mean turning teachers into therapists

This distinction is essential.

If healing becomes part of education, teachers should not become amateur psychotherapists. A mathematics teacher should not diagnose trauma. A history teacher should not pressure students to disclose painful experiences. A classroom should not become compulsory group therapy.

Some wounds require specialized clinical care. Schools need qualified counsellors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, Indigenous support workers, and other professionals, with clear pathways for referral and crisis response.

But healing-oriented education operates at another level.

It asks teachers to create conditions in which the whole person is allowed to learn.

It is less about treating students and more about changing how we teach, relate, organize time, understand knowledge, respond to conflict, and inhabit the classroom together.

What could healing actually look like in a North American classroom?

A disclaimer: I have never acted as a teacher at a school in North America, but I have taught in Afghanistan in elementary school, high school, and a higher-education institute.

To include healing in a school, adding a course called Healing 101 is not required. Nor does it require sacrificing mathematics, science, literature, or history. Healing can be woven into ordinary education, in every class and with every act.

I long for healing every day, and what I share below is my own personal reflection and way of being and doing.

Begin class by helping students arrive

A student may physically enter a classroom while psychologically remaining somewhere else—in an argument at home, an experience of racism on the bus, worry about money, a frightening news story, a breakup, a parent’s illness, or simply exhaustion.

A teacher might begin with two quiet minutes.

This is not psychotherapy. It is teaching presence.

Young people who spend thousands of hours learning how to calculate, memorize, and analyze might also graduate knowing how to notice what is happening within themselves.

Make the body part of learning

The body should not be treated as a troublesome vehicle carrying the brain from classroom to classroom. Students can move. They can occasionally learn outside. They can notice bodily responses to stress and concentration. A teacher can normalize stretching, breathing, walking reflection, sensory awareness, movement, art, rhythm, and appropriate silence.

One of the first questions a teacher usually asks is how to make these bodies stay still so their minds can learn. This question, however, needs to be replaced with a different one: “How can embodied human beings learn?” An embodied human being lives in the present moment, bridging their past to the future they wish to make through the choices they make, their worries, hopes, fears, stories, and body.

We should not wait until children are overwhelmed to teach them how to recognize anger, grief, fear, shame, joy, confusion, loneliness, or hope.

Literature offers obvious opportunities. Instead of only asking about symbolism in a novel, ask what grief does to its characters, how shame changes relationships, or how someone finds dignity after humiliation.

History provides another opportunity. What happens psychologically to communities under forced displacement? What is carried across generations after war? How do societies remember atrocities? What is reconciliation? Can justice and forgiveness coexist?

Even conflict among students can become educational material—not by publicly exposing students, but by teaching skills of listening, repair, accountability, boundaries, apology, and restoration.

Create space for grief

Schools know how to celebrate achievement. We have graduations, awards, honor rolls, sports victories, performances, and ceremonies. But where do students learn to grieve?

Children lose grandparents. Families separate. Friends move away. Communities experience violence. Refugee children lose countries. Indigenous communities carry histories that remain painfully present. Students watch wars, fires, floods, and suffering through screens. But schools tend to remain silent, even when they promote the idea that “we don’t want to trigger them.” Silence, however, is not the same as safety. Silence does not make grief disappear; it can teach children that certain pain is too uncomfortable, disruptive, or dangerous to bring into the classroom.

When education refuses to acknowledge suffering that students are already carrying, the burden does not vanish—it is simply carried alone. A healing-oriented classroom does not force students to disclose their wounds or repeatedly expose them to painful material. It creates compassionate and voluntary spaces where difficult realities can be named, grief can be recognized, and students can choose whether and how they wish to participate.

The goal is not to trigger pain, but neither is it to organize education around avoiding pain. It is to help young people discover that suffering can be approached with care, relationship, dignity, and meaning rather than only with silence.

Education does not need to manufacture grief. Grief is already in the classroom. What is often missing is permission to acknowledge it.

Age-appropriate remembrance, silence, writing, poetry, art, storytelling, memorial practices, community circles, or simply a teacher saying, “Something painful happened, and we do not need to pretend that nothing happened,” can be profoundly humanizing.

Teach history as something that requires relationship and repair

A healing-oriented history class does not merely ask students to memorize colonialism, slavery, residential schools, migration, war, or genocide for an examination.

It asks what these histories continue to do in the present.

This is where education can move beyond guilt toward responsibility and relationship.

Healing-oriented education should neither teach children that they are personally guilty for everything their ancestors or societies did nor allow historical violence to become emotionally neutral information.

One question we can ask children is: now that we know, how should we live together?

Restore land and nature to education

Healing should also challenge the assumption that education happens primarily inside buildings. Students can learn from rivers, forests, gardens, animals, seasons, weather, and the particular lands upon which their schools stand. This does not mean romanticizing nature or casually borrowing Indigenous teachings. I am not Indigenous to this part of the world, and I have learned that Indigenous knowledge must be engaged respectfully, locally, relationally, and with Indigenous communities rather than extracted as another educational resource.

But every student can learn that Earth is more than scenery surrounding human civilization—beyond selfie photos posted on social media, owning a property and calling it “home,” or treating nature as a resource to be used, managed, and consumed for human benefit. Ecological relationship can and should become part of education.

A science lesson about a river can ask about chemistry and biodiversity while also asking: What is our relationship with this river? Who has lived beside it? What has industry done to it? What responsibilities accompany knowing these facts? Knowledge can and should lead us toward relationships.

Some human experiences cannot initially be expressed through analytical language. Children and adolescents may discover something through drawing, music, poetry, dance, theatre, movement, photography, or storytelling that they cannot express in an essay. Art should therefore not be treated merely as enrichment after the “serious” subjects are completed. Human beings have used art to mourn, remember, resist, celebrate, worship, survive, and create meaning for thousands of years. A healing education recognizes art as a way of knowing.

Teach conflict as something that can be transformed

Students inevitably hurt one another; hurt and pain are part of the realities of our lives. Schools often respond through a disciplinary logic: Who violated the rule? What punishment applies based on school policy?

Sometimes consequences are absolutely necessary because safety matters. This should not minimize the importance of having rules. But another set of questions can accompany consequences:

I do not think these questions are merely disciplinary. They are lessons about how human beings live together after relationships rupture. They invite us to see a person fully, with all their complexities.

Make room for silence and contemplation

I have visited schools, listened to school authorities, spoken with students, and learned from my wife’s work at a school. I have also been a university student for almost five years. Schools are extraordinarily busy places: bell, instruction, assignment, lunch, another bell, another subject, homework, test, performance, repeat.

But we are human beings who need moments in which nothing is demanded of us. Children especially need moments of doing nothing, particularly as social media has created pressures and patterns of attention we have never before experienced.

A minute of silence, reflective journaling, contemplative reading, breathing, looking through a window, walking quietly outside, prayer where appropriate and freely chosen, or simply sitting without needing to produce anything can interrupt the idea that a person’s value is determined by constant productivity. I recognize that these practices may not work for everyone because we have different nervous systems.

Children need to learn not only how to do, but also how to be. I do not see enough of the latter occurring in schools today.

What about spirituality?

This may be one of the most difficult questions for North American public education. Simply living in North America, one can see the colourful mosaic of spiritual practices, places of worship, and the work these places do for their communities. At the same time, a growing body of thought addresses crises of meaning and complex mental-health challenges, while educational systems struggle to respond.

Healing often involves questions that are spiritual or existential: Who am I? What gives my life meaning? What do I owe other people? What is sacred? How do I live with death? What is forgiveness? What makes life worth living? What does my tradition teach me? Where do I come from?

As an old saying suggests, half of the answer is embedded in the question. One thread connects these questions: relationship. Failing to recognize this thread has contributed to an extreme version of individualism in North America.

Public schools should not impose religion. But protecting students from religious coercion does not require pretending that human beings have no spiritual or existential lives. A pluralistic classroom can allow students to encounter religious, Indigenous, humanist, philosophical, contemplative, and secular traditions without requiring adherence to any of them.

Education can protect freedom of conscience while still taking the human search for meaning seriously.

Healing cannot become another competency to measure

There is a danger here.

Modern educational institutions are remarkably skilled at taking transformative ideas and turning them into measurable programs.

If we are not careful, healing will become another rubric: Student demonstrates healing: 3/4.

That would contradict the very idea.

A student should never receive a lower grade because they have not forgiven someone. Nobody should be required to disclose trauma for participation marks. Grief should not have a deadline. Spirituality should not be assessed. Reconciliation cannot be standardized. Students should always have the right to pass when an exercise asks for personal reflection.

Healing requires invitation, consent, relationship, time, and dignity.

Teachers need healing spaces too

We cannot ask exhausted teachers to create healing classrooms while working inside institutions that continually wound them.

Teachers themselves experience burnout, grief, violence, impossible workloads, administrative pressure, large classrooms, racism, precarious employment, and the emotional burden of caring for distressed children.

Therefore, healing-oriented education must be institutional, not merely pedagogical.

Teachers need time. Smaller classes matter. Counsellors matter. Community partnerships matter. Reasonable workloads matter. Staff relationships matter. Physical environments matter. Policies matter.

A school cannot preach regulation to children while organizing adult life around chronic dysregulation.

From trauma-informed education to healing-oriented education

“Trauma-informed” education has been an important development over the last several decades. An educator supports a student by understanding that a behaviour has a history behind it. Safety, predictability, relationship, and regulation matter because each addresses a different part of trauma. But I think we should not stop here; we should move beyond the boundaries of trauma-informed education.

Trauma-informed education’s overarching question is: What happened to this student? It recognizes the wound. Healing-oriented education asks a broader question: What relationships, practices, cultures, environments, stories, and possibilities help human beings and communities become more whole? Trauma-informed education sees the individual; healing-oriented education views the person—the whole.

Students are more than their trauma. A refugee child is not simply a traumatized refugee; the child’s roots are in different places. An Indigenous child is not an accumulation of intergenerational wounds; the child carries the resistance and wisdom of their ancestors. A Black child should not be reduced to experiences of racism or poverty; the child has a profound sense of humour, imagination, and art. A struggling adolescent is not a danger or merely a case for diagnosis; the teen is beautiful, friendly, and part of making the future.

There is pain, but there is also ancestry, humour, imagination, resistance, friendship, culture, beauty, spirituality, creativity, land, love, and possibility.

Healing-oriented education must make room for all of these.

Education itself can wound

I think this is the hardest point to raise in this personal reflection. We often imagine schools as places where wounded children arrive, receive support through tools such as an IEP, become educated, find work, and move forward in life. But education itself has sometimes been an instrument of wounding—or of furthering the wound.

North American colonial history makes this impossible to ignore. Schooling has been used to separate children from languages, cultures, communities, land, families, and ways of knowing. Educational systems have also reproduced racial, economic, gendered, ableist, and cultural hierarchies. Asking schools to participate in healing therefore requires more than adding mindfulness exercises to an unchanged institution, recruiting more counsellors, or developing IEPs.

A school cannot tell children to breathe deeply in the morning and then spend the rest of the day reproducing humiliation, exclusion, relentless competition, cultural erasure, and fear of failure. Millions of children experience bullying. There is a school-to-prison pipeline. Some children live in foster care, group homes, refugee shelters, or temporary housing. Some live with a parent struggling with addiction. Some cannot access enough healthy food. Some witness violence or uncertainty every day.

Some arrive at school carrying grief that has never been named, languages treated as deficits, identities that are marginalized, or responsibilities far beyond their years.

Healing must eventually ask structural questions—and people working at schools, attending them, sending their children, financing them, and reporting on them must collectively build answers:

These questions make healing political, but not partisan. They concern how institutions distribute dignity, belonging, voice, power, and possibility.

A different image of the classroom

Imagine a classroom where a child learns mathematics and also learns how to recognize when frustration is taking over their body.

Imagine learning history while being invited to consider memory, grief, responsibility, and repair.

Imagine reading literature not simply to identify metaphors but to encounter another human consciousness.

Imagine science reconnecting children to soil, water, animals, climate, and responsibility for the living world.

Imagine conflict becoming an opportunity to learn accountability and repair.

Imagine students learning that asking for help is not failure.

Imagine silence having a place alongside speech.

Imagine teachers knowing that they do not have to become therapists to treat students as whole human beings.

Imagine a student graduating knowing something about algebra, biology, history, and literature—but also knowing:

Would that be less rigorous education? Think again. I think it would demand a much richer understanding of rigor.

Healing is not an addition to education

I am not advocating adding another program to the long list of school programs and calling it a “healing program.” That could become one more initiative operating at the institution’s edges. I want to pose this question for reflection: What would education look like if healing were understood as one of its purposes?

There is no debate over the indispensability of school counsellors and school-based mental-health services. Students experiencing significant psychological distress would still need qualified professional care. But healing would no longer begin only after a student becomes symptomatic enough to be referred.

It would exist in the architecture of everyday education: in how teachers welcome students, how classrooms hold emotion, how bodies are allowed to move, how histories are taught, how conflict is repaired, how cultures are respected, how the Earth is encountered, how silence is protected, how art is valued, how communities participate, and how students learn to hear their own voices.

For me, the purpose of education is always too small when it is defined mainly as acquiring knowledge and preparing for employment. Education certainly should help us understand the world. But we also need to learn how to remain human within an educational system.

In a time marked by war, displacement, loneliness, ecological crisis, racial injustice, political polarization, economic insecurity, and profound disconnection, that task is no longer peripheral. It may be one of education’s most urgent responsibilities: helping cultivate human beings and communities capable of meeting wounds with relationship, dignity, meaning, care, accountability, and the possibility of transformation.