This chapter introduces violence as a tension in education studies with iconoclasm and religious persecution as a guiding force in educational conformity. Moments of invasion, religious destruction, and dogmatic imposition, and foreign attacks on Mesoamerica’s multidimensional archives set a darker tone for the book. Weighty theories highlight violence and sudden change as hindering coherent local learning modalities. This is especially shown in discussions on place as a factor in power-knowledge construction and destruction, highlighting moments of ‘placebreaking’, or the direct assault on historic sites to remove community attachments, that Nahuas faced in military campaigns. Flexible, adaptive placemaking and ethnogenesis after a moment of placebreaking are offered as ways that newly Christian communities reconciled a history of violence. Regionally, it focuses on the religious and educational capital of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. This was the earliest assault upon an example of a Mesoamerican learningscape, and this event is reframed to include differing Indigenous visions of destroying a place of learning. The thought is carried forward into the period of early Christianization, during which Motolinía is identified as an agent of compelled placebreaking but also a documentarian of the inability to complete the spiritual conquest.