When Schools Produce Violence: Institutional Micro-violences and the Responses of Children and Families

Abstract

The article examines those circumstances in which schools produce violence and proposes a shift: rather than offering quick explanations or ready-made intervention 'recipes,' it interrogates how institutions—often unknowingly—produce everyday forms of symbolic violence and an adult-centred matrix that affects young children as well as their families. From a rights-based and socio-institutional perspective—situated between Uruguay and Argentina—the text draws on sociology of education (symbolic violence, cultural arbitrariness, the hidden curriculum, and school grammar) and childhood studies to understand how routines, coexistence rules, and judgments about “good behaviour” shape unequal positions within the pedagogical relationship. Through scenes and examples, it identifies recurring micro-violences: the regulation of bodies and time under the language of care and safety; the production of “presentable” outcomes that subordinate experience to results; the dismissal of prior knowledge; and the infantilization or exclusion of mothers and fathers from school life. The article concludes with action-oriented guidelines: strengthening institutional channels to name and work through discomfort, sustaining regular spaces for scene analysis and the revision of agreements, and promoting situated professional learning that makes the criteria organizing everyday school life debatable, communicable, and transmissible.