I like to arrive early to school, to set up for the day. It’s Monday morning after a short holiday and the usual quiet atmosphere presents itself. Quiet in terms of people, but today the space is different.

On clicking through the first sliding doors with my ID, there is white tape on the floor; there’s a line down the middle of the corridor separating right from left. Within the separations there are arrows in opposing directions, suggesting which way we should be travelling on either side. My walk stutters and stops. Suddenly I’m not sure what to do. It is no longer quiet at all for me, but quietly jangling, a developing sense of unease. I wanted an explanation that made sense. The wanting itself felt heavy.

Cognitive dissonance is a state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. I’ve got cognitive dissonance.

I don’t know what to do. Do I follow the arrows? Not follow the arrows? Do I rip the tape up ……… turn around and go home?

I’m a grown up. I’m even considered to be a professional in this space. But I start to think of the arriving young people. What do they think or do? How’s the youthful dissonance?

I don’t rip the tape up, or turn to go home. I try walking the ‘wrong’ way, already with a slight unconscious turn of my head to see if anyone is looking, checking. Then I try the ‘right’ way – no look, but a sense of discomfort that lasts the rest of the day ….. and term ….. and beyond.

Here’s what made it worse. There was no staff meeting. No email. No consultation with anyone, let alone the young people who’d be walking these corridors. The tape just appeared, like it had always been there, like it was natural law rather than someone’s decision made in secret. This is how oppression in schools normalises itself. So far away from any consultation with the school community as a whole.

W.E.B Du Bois talked about a double consciousness, of always seeing oneself through the eyes of another; the oppressed always being seen through the eyes of the oppressor. Indeed, he wrote:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk

That’s what those arrows did. They made me see myself through someone else’s eyes before I’d even decided how I wanted to move. And I’m an adult. I’m meant to have agency here. For the young people walking these corridors every day, this is just Tuesday.

With no lead up to this new significant behaviour direction, Du Bois’s idea of only seeing oneself through the eyes of others was pertinent for me as an adult and as someone with apparent agency within the system, as the sense of something being forced by another was strong. For a child or young person though this must be 10 times greater as these lines are the tip of a stifling and oppressive iceberg. This is oppression in schools made visible. Given the school experience as a whole, for a racialised, minoritised child or young person, do some more maths.

So, why a mouse trap? The idea of this control being randomly applied with no consultation and from a force that seems bigger and more powerful, and immovable; the tape was placed on the floor, awaiting unsuspecting prey. Maybe the school’s reward system and behaviour points are the lure of peanut butter. The mouse too is not human with the obvious comparison of the human child as non-human and prone to experimentation. To use Paulo Freire’s words, ‘to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.’ This is how oppression in schools operates – not through grand announcements, but through tape on floors.

After all, the trap doesn’t need to kill you to work. It just needs to teach you that someone else owns the space you’re moving through. That your route isn’t yours to decide.

A ‘dogged strength’ means that many choose to be in the school system, but what if you had no choice but to be there, how much would this strength be challenged on a daily basis, with no apparent change in sight?

What then to do instead, to avoid this suffocating, polarising attempt at behaviour control. I wonder what would happen in time if there was consultation (at the very least)? What if we shared this decision making with all members of our school community (the children and young people, parents, cleaners, teachers …….. ) in a democratic and affirming process? This wouldn’t be an over-night solution, as we are so accustomed to accommodate and accept, or even a mid-term approach. But, in equitable decision making and solidarity, a more hopeful landscape could be imagined and designed.

But here’s the question I can’t shake: how many young people walked past that tape this morning and didn’t even register it anymore? How many have stopped asking why? When control becomes wallpaper, when oppression in schools becomes the corridor itself, what does dogged strength even mean?

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face –
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face –
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind –
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

I look at the world – BY LANGSTON HUGHES