Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Content Warning: This section contains discussions of racism.

“In this educational era, resonating with appeals for standards and standardization, driven by the requirements of accountability and evaluation, the words, metaphors, and images that come to our minds and haunt our public consciousness carry just the opposite meaning: they speak of uniformity and conformity, management and control, of achievement and success as measured by narrow assessment tools and remote, quantifiable metrics.”

This passage introduces the theme of Imposing Conformity Through Exclusion in School Culture. Shalaby indicts the contemporary educational era for subjecting learners to standardization, equations, and control, thereby crushing creativity and freedom. Moreover, she implies that tracked trajectories defined by metrics do not adequately reflect learners’ growth, which is highly individual. The loud refusal of so-called “troublemakers” to participate in this system exposes the dehumanizing effects of the classroom: lost purpose, deadened curiosity, and even despair.

“Routinely pathologized through testing, labels, and often hastily prescribed medications, these young people are systematically marginalized and excluded through the use of segregated remediation, detentions, suspensions, and expulsions. The patterns of their experiences, especially those of older children, are well documented in what we know about the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Shalaby investigates the interconnected educational practices that push students of color toward incarceration, including pathologizing of difference, segregation of nonconformists, exclusion through hierarchical penalty, and the alienation of those who miss schooling. Shalaby argues that this trajectory maintains an underclass by design and that children’s defiance is an attempt to refuse their assigned place in a system designed not for freedom but for its deprivation.

“Unquestioning deference to authority is the requirement and the expectation of school, where adult directives replace children’s own desires.”

School culture, Shalaby argues, enforces automatic deference and obedience, violating young people’s rights and dignity. According to Shalaby, neutral classroom management is a myth implicitly based on stripping children of their autonomy. Daily rituals, even a morning lineup, instill subordination and passive acceptance rather than critical thought. The hidden curriculum therefore normalizes absolute hierarchical power. It demands children neglect their own preferences and questions to become pliant, manageable subjects in both the classroom and society at large (for all the latter claims to be democratic).