'In military terms, we are just collateral damage': School closures and symbolic violence

Schools can be permanently closed for many reasons - economic rationalisation, post-disaster relocations, population decline or educational failure. Research on permanent school closures reports mostly negative and long-lasting consequences, not just for the school's staff and students, but for the local community. After the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand, the Ministry of Education produced a plan to permanently close or merge 38 schools. The author followed one school through its closure and the early stages of its merger with a neighbouring school. Although the two schools came together to create a new entity with a new name, the process was not without emotional harm to the school designated as the 'closing' school. The `continuing' school, on the other hand, appeared to act beyond its brief and behave in ways that unintentionally contributed to that harm. In the interviews with the closing school, participants reported acts of careless disregard, humiliation and even vindictiveness by the continuing school community. While the emotional impact will have declined over time, there is merit in examining what happened in order to make better policy and implementation decisions for similar situations in the future. In this article, I use Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic power and symbolic violence to discuss what happened and field, capital and habitus to posit an explanation for why the continuing school acted in the way that it did and why the closing school capitulated.