We talk about belonging as though it’s always a good thing—warm, grounding, a place to rest your feet and your ideas. In schools, in workplaces, in our friendships, belonging is often presented as the ultimate form of safety. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: belonging can just as easily become a gatekeeper as a gift. It can build glass ceilings even as it promises community.
If that sounds contradictory, it’s because belonging is a contradictory thing. How often have you felt you don’t belong somewhere? People often describe it as imposter syndrome, or a feeling of inadequacy. Many organisations are constructed to make people feel like they are not worthy to sit at the table. It’s a maintaining of social order.
Belonging as a Construct, a Social One
The way we talk about belonging often feels natural, almost instinctive, but as Paulo Freire reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), the structures we take for granted—curriculum, authority, hierarchy—are rarely neutral. They’re built by someone, for someone. Belonging is no different.
Freire argues that education can either function as an instrument of liberation or an instrument of control. Belonging sometimes works exactly the same way. When we say, “This is how we do things here,” we’re not just offering culture. We’re offering conditions—sometimes invisible ones—for acceptance. Those conditions can keep people “in their place,” building a ceiling made of expectations rather than glass.
Belonging, in this sense, becomes a curriculum: a set of lessons about who fits, who doesn’t, and what one must do to stay inside the circle.
The Beatles Had a Point
It’s a bit ironic that a Beatles song about going home—“Get Back”—captures so well the feeling of being pushed out of places you were never fully welcomed into.
“Get back to where you once belonged.”
The line works both ways: as a call to return to yourself, and as a polite dismissal from someone else’s space. A push away from somewhere that does not welcome you. When you watch the Beatles writing the track, you can see Lennon and McCartney wrestling with this difficult truth. Belonging is always double-edged. If you’ve ever felt the need to shrink yourself to stay in a group, you know exactly how sharp that edge can be.
How Belonging Builds Ceilings
When belonging is conditional, it starts to shape behavior. Students learn early that certain identities are praised and others tolerated; that certain voices are welcomed and others deemed “disruptive”; that certain dreams fit within the school’s narrative while others are “unrealistic.”
Research in educational psychology (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2007; Goodenow, 1993) has long shown that belonging predicts motivation, persistence, and achievement. But that’s only half the story. Belonging also predicts conformity. When the cost of acceptance is self-editing, belonging becomes a limiter rather than a lifeline.
In this way, belonging can create ceilings made not of glass, but of expectations so subtle that students don’t always realize they’re bending under them.
The Paradox: We Need Belonging—And Yet…
Here’s the twist. Even with all these contradictions, belonging is still one of our deepest human needs. Maslow wasn’t wrong. Neuroscience isn’t wrong. Our nervous systems literally relax when we feel seen and held by a community. And yet we grow by moving—by seeking places where our full selves have room to breathe.
Maya Angelou captured this beautifully when she said:
“You only are free when you realise you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.”
Angelou isn’t dismissing belonging. She’s expanding it. She’s naming the liberation that comes when belonging stops being conditional and starts being rooted in dignity.
What This Means for Schools
Schools often treat belonging as something we give to students—something they access by fitting into our system. But if belonging is socially constructed, then it’s also ‘reconstructable.’
We can build schools where belonging isn’t a tool of assimilation but an invitation to inhabit one’s full, expansive self.
Where students feel not only welcomed here, but empowered to find belonging anywhere.
Where belonging doesn’t ask for compliance, but invites courage.
‘Be yourself, wherever you find yourself.’
Our job isn’t simply to help students feel connected in our classrooms. It’s to help them trust that connection is their right—not a reward for fitting in, but a birthright of being human.
Because belonging shouldn’t be the ceiling.
It should be the floor—the place from which every student rises
The Belonging Collective 