We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

by Bettina L. Love

School officials will put everything before students’ actual mental health, not understanding that test scores cannot and will not increase until students are healing from trauma and/or mattering to themselves and their community.

For schools to be well, educators need to be well. Educators need free therapy, love, compassion, and healing, and to embrace theories that explain why getting well is so hard.

Schools cannot be doing just alright; they have to be well by putting everyone’s mental health as the first priority and understanding how systems of oppression spirit-murder children.