Not everything that hurts is trauma

And not everything that feels good is learning

There’s a peculiar modern heresy doing the rounds in schools. It whispers that anything difficult is dangerous, that confusion is failure, that struggle is harm. It rebrands ordinary discomfort as damage and recasts indulgence as care. Its gospel is safety, its liturgy is affirmation, and its unintended consequence is infantilisation.

We might call it therapeutic education, though it rarely speaks its name. It arrives via language: “safe spaces,” “emotional load,” “triggering,” “trauma-informed practice.” It creeps in under the banner of kindness. Who could possibly object?¹

And yet, as I argued here, we are now facing a profound cultural split, a new educational dichotomy. On one side, an academic model, which sees the child as a novice in need of initiation into powerful knowledge. On the other, a therapeutic model, which sees the child as fragile, wounded, and in need of protection from harm.

Once you accept the therapeutic premise - that difficulty is damaging, that confusion is inherently unsafe - then challenge becomes cruelty, rigour becomes abusive and struggle becomes neglect. The role of the teacher subtly shifts: not to lift children into complexity, but to cushion them from it.

Let’s be clear: not everything that hurts is traumatic and not everything that feels good is will lead to learning.

The myth of safety

There’s a growing allergy in many classrooms to discomfort. If a child is confused, it’s seen as a failure of planning. If they’re frustrated, the task must be pitched too high. If they’re silent, something must be “wrong” with the learning environment or the material being taught.

But confusion is not a symptom of error. It is a sign that we are struggling to integrate new ideas into our view of the world. We tend not to learn by feeling certain. When we’re sure, we tend not to look and we’re less likely to see anything that will surprise us.

The Necker Cube is a good example of this phenomenon. We’re so used to seeing this two dimensional representation of a cube that our response is likely to simply nod and and ask, so what? But if you stare at it intently for about five seconds you’ll see something that might surprise you. Go on, have a go:

The cube ‘pops’. The back wall suddenly flips to the front. If you continue to stare, it will flip back. The drawing is ambiguous but we select an interpretation of each part that makes the whole consistent but it’s not until we look at it with a sense of openess and a willingness to be surprised that we become aware of the ambiguity.

We often learn by realising we were wrong. Confusion is not the enemy of learning, if we’re willing to sit with confusion, if we’re open to the idea that it brings new insight, then it becomes the birthplace of learning.

Obviously, this is not an original insight. Bjork calls it desirable difficulty. Piaget called it disequilibrium. Bruner called it cognitive conflict. The idea is simple: if our experiences don’t disrupt the way you perceive the world, they probably haven’t changed us. And what is learning if not change? The more profound the disruption, the more durable the change is likely to be.

And yet, schools seem increasingly determined to protect children from precisely the conditions under which learning occurs. Texts are simplified, easy tasks are made easier with scaffolding, answers are spoon-fed. And all the while, we reassure ourselves that children are thriving because they’re comfortable.

But just as comfort is not a proxy for progress neither is struggle a synonym for suffering.

The cult of trauma