2024 Recipient of The Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award!

Drawing inspiration from Dr. Willi Schohaus’s classic text The Dark Places of Education, this book contributes to the discussion by defining suffering in schools and providing a survey of the American school system’s inadequacies in the early twenty-first century.

Through testimonies from former students on the ways they experienced suffering in school, this volume demonstrates how suffering can profoundly affect one’s academic growth and development—or worse. By analyzing the findings within a multidisciplinary ethical and educational framework, this volume presents a moral vision for understanding the role that suffering plays in school.

Drawing on research in medicine, psychology, social sciences, religion, and education, this text weaves together many strands of thinking about suffering. This book is essential reading for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of educational leadership, foundations of education, and those interested in both the history of education and critical contemporary accounts of schooling.