In recent weeks, Brazil’s schools have come under such a threat of violence that there has been talk of suspending classes. This is shocking because the school is Western society’s primary means of confronting barbarism. All threats against schools have an immediate effect: panic and “every person for themselves.” Violence against schools is thus an attack on the possibility of living with one another.

Which is why we must ask ourselves – what is behind the attacks on schools? Panic takes people out of the collective space, it locks them in their houses, it empties public spaces. And it creates a sense of fragility. The effect on our thoughts is to stop us from thinking; the effect on our bodies is to make us shake or scream, or to silence us and interrupt conversations. The effect on life is to isolate.

In such situations we insistently ask the same questions: who will save us? Who is responsible? The disintegrating effect never supposes a collective response, but only seeks someone to blame. We keep our eyes peeled for the “rotten apple”, as if everything will be solved by removing the spoiled fruit from the basket.

Violence against the school seeks to make us believe that, in order to be safe, we must vacate the common space and stop forming communities. This is what we attack when we attack the school. Violence against the school makes us doubt its ability to fulfill its social function: the goal is to reduce its role as a space for coexistence and belonging. It is in exactly this sense that the school is being violated as a public space, violated as a space for coexistence, violated as the first place, outside the family, that allows our experiences with the other to be formed.

The tragedies in the Vila Sônia district of São Paulo, and in the city of Blumenau in the state of Santa Catarina, cases of extreme violence that took place in schools, are expressions of the multi-dimensional conflicts we are living through as a society. However, the threats against schools that began to proliferate following the attacks – those that went viral on social media, causing families to keep their children away from school on April 20, the date of the 1999 Columbine massacre in the US – are not an expression of conflict. As Rinaldo Voltolini, psychoanalyst and professor at the University of São Paulo, taught me, such cases are about promoting, not expressing, conflict. This fundamental difference, between expression and promotion, and the way in which these two definitions are linked, can help us understand what is happening.

It is important to examine the various factors that make up this conflict. Studies by the Study and Research in Moral Education Group and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the State University of Campinas argue that violence inside schools, as well as attacks against them, is related to the rise of ultra-conservatism and right-wing extremism in Brazil – and also to the lack of control and criminalization of the discourse that surrounds such extremism. These data were analyzed by the transition team of the government of Brazil president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, leading us to the conclusion that while we may say we were frightened by such terrible events, no one, or no institution, with access to such studies can say they were surprised by them.

To begin, it is important to pay attention to what causes general alarm and what is invisible: on the same day as the tragedy in Blumenau, two armored carloads of police officers entered a school in the Complexo da Maré region of Rio de Janeiro, searching for members of armed gangs who had hidden there. It should hardly need to be said, yet it does: in Maré, as in every other corner of Brazil, the school is a place for children. Adding to the crisis, invading the walls of the school, committing violence not against a school, but against the school – the central institution of our social framework – is by no means an ordinary, objectiveless gesture.

We have been confronted with a significant opportunity to understand public safety as a determinant of mental health – and to think about the role of the school in this construct. To achieve this, we must tackle the current tendency to reduce a social problem to an individual question. Performing a mental health diagnosis of the aggressors, for example, is a clear attempt to avoid the political critique required: it is our social functioning, with its strategies of exclusion, that conditions the production of violence that occurs in schools, and against the school.

The Indian researcher Vikram Patel defines mental health as belonging, thus challenging this understanding and helping us understand the relationships between public safety and mental health. As a result, we can all understand that occupying, using, and enjoying the common space produces security – and also good mental health. We may, after all, ask: who can live well when feeling unsafe? Who can live well with others when they feel threatened?

The promotion of mental health is part of the public mandate for health, which, in order to achieve its objective of transforming the social reality of children and young people, must work in tandem with the school. This prerogative cannot be reduced to having a psychologist listen to each child individually, but must include the promotion of actions and gestures, within the school, that produce acceptance, listening and conversation. We must make the school a place of belonging for children and young people, and make coexistence part of the curriculum.

When we think of school, we readily consider its role of transmitting the culture produced by humanity in the form of academic content. In addition to and linked to this task, however, is how it should be performed, and how the time available for and investment in each form of content should be distributed. It is in this context that coexistence can be considered to have curricular status among educational practices. In educating new generations, the specific contents of the field of formal knowledge are as important as the uses that can be made of them. A curriculum that distributes knowledge about Black and Indigenous cultures and which simultaneously builds relationships between people and their differences, within the school, is a curriculum that puts coexistence in its human dimensions into practice, and places it on the school floor.

Brazil’s native peoples, through the different ways in which each ethnic group and village creates and produces collectivity, have a lot to teach us about what coexistence is, and the practices that unite children and young people. The school, in turn, can invent several propositional strategies for coexistence, but none will be as powerful as the construction of an anti-racist and anti-ableist curriculum.

The growing vulnerability of the experiences of childhood and youth, among all the populations victimized by hate speech, has serious effects on mental health. This is why we must question why the extremely welcome, newly created Department of Mental Health of the Ministry of Health still does not have a designated department for childhood and adolescence.

The answer to this problem has remained the same since the early years of psychiatric reform: “Childhood and youth are transversal themes”. This is true. But now we need a department that supports the cross-sectional nature of this debate, that supports and coordinates the promotion of mental health through the social protection network, of which the school is a part. A department that confronts the individualizing, pathologizing logic, and which can support and encourage local solutions. A department that disputes budgets and supports the application of the most robust treatment we need: the construction of possibilities of belonging. A department that tackles concepts of security that produce panic.

What we owe to children and young people, at this time, is to devote all our strength and resources into supporting the possibility of living with each other in safety. What has occurred, however, is quite different.

Greater investment by governments and schools in policing and technology to control access has been advocated, reducing the idea of security to that of police security. In tandem with this approach, the hiring of psychologists to work within schools and talk to students has been proposed. But it must be asked whether this is an attempt at producing good mental health, or an investment in investigative processes that are more consistent with a policing than a health strategy.

Without discarding the value of school police patrols at this precise moment, we cannot forget that public security is something much bigger and more complex than police security. The data we have gathered from American experiences of arming and armoring schools tell us this: while schools gained security apparatus, there was no reduction in violence. Security is connected to the production of a common and regulated space, with community strength. Intuitively, we have all known this since Little Red Riding Hood: “Don’t go down that lonely path, keep to where there are people.” And there are more contemporary versions: “When you leave school or college at night, go to the subway in a group, don’t be alone in the square.” What kind of society is it where people have become threats instead of protection, enemies instead of communities?

What we need is to reinvent the experience of being together. For this, it is useful to remember we are all playing in the same soccer game: children, young people, families, schools and the authorities. But we don’t all play in the same positions, and so we need to organize ourselves to keep the ball moving.

The school, with its children and young people, needs to deliver education against barbarism, and needs to transform what is happening into a learning context. It needs a curriculum that is thought out and agreed with each age group, which makes room for socializing and distributes resources of belonging, conversation and listening. By promoting coexistence, we act against experiences of humiliation and the loss of belonging. By promoting coexistence, we strengthen the common space and act against hate speech.

Confronting hate speech also involves regulating and controlling content on digital platforms, understanding that the internet and social media are a public space that needs to be regulated. Unregulated and uncontrolled social media is a place where potential aggressors build their own sense of community and belonging.

We need to overcome the barrier of countless meetings in which we discuss and agree on coping strategies, but which fail to create well-thought out policies that go beyond the corridors of power, that have sufficient budgets, that reach the territories they are destined for and which effectively promote the social transformation we claim to desire.