Using ethnographic field-notes as stories and applying a critical perspective, the study in this paper locates school violence in communities, in relationships, and in school procedures. The author contends that the symbolic violence that surrounds how schools operate often goes unrecognised and uncontested. The findings displace the conventional notion that violence starts and ends with individual students, to show how community contexts, social relations and structures, and school procedures intersect to re-inscribe violent behaviour among some students. The discussion draws attention to the restrictive practices of schools and zero tolerance national policies that exclude students from engaging in a critical dialogue about how to make school work in their favour. Consequently, what is needed are curricular processes that engender a critical consciousness among students, interrupt the silence in the curriculum on violence and dealing with conflict, and operationalise the social constructivist philosophical underpinnings of the national curriculum objectives to be achieved in working learning environments.