Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

“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). The labeling of nonconformity as deviance or pathology supports this end, as Shalaby views Disruption as Communication and Resistance.

“Classrooms must be places in which we practice freedom. They must be microcosms of the kind of authentic democracy we have yet to enact outside those walls—spaces for young people, by young people—engaging our youth to practice their power and to master the skills required by freedom.”

Classrooms are not yet liberated spaces, Shalaby argues. To become so, they must model democracy for the rest of society. This, for Shalaby, involves valuing questioning and nonconformity.

“If nearly half of our children fail to follow directions, we should question the appropriateness of the requirement. Instead, we turn a gaze of pathology on children.”

Shalaby here introduces a paradox: that schools pathologize children for failing to meet developmentally inappropriate demands. Shalaby argues that teachers must turn their critical gaze from students to classroom conditions and reject the dehumanizing discipline that stunts individuality and freedom. They must learn to hear students—particularly the grievances underpinning student anger. Growth depends not on remediating nonconformists but on creating nurturing environments that embrace every child.

“If schools fail to offer young people the chance to imagine freedom, to practice freedom, and to prepare for freedom, it is unlikely that these young people will prove able to create the free country human beings deserve.”

In a call to action rooted in moral imperative, Shalaby asserts that schools must teach the skills and responsibilities associated with freedom or risk abdicating their role in sustaining civic society and democratic agency. Currently, Shalaby argues, classrooms produce worker-learners rather than empowered citizens who can hold authority accountable—a loss not only for the students but for society as a whole. Shalaby envisions schools that honor young people’s full humanity, engaging their capacity for individual expression and social change. Shalaby’s vision centers schools as microcosms for practicing freedom, justice, and equality.

“Elementary school teachers, especially in urban centers, name behavioral challenges as their number one issue of concern, often identifying disruptive behavior as the biggest issue facing their schools.”

Citing education research, Shalaby insists that pervasive disciplinary crises demand a reexamination of school requirements. In particular, the “behavioral challenges” present in urban schools signal unjust environments rather than individual pathology. Student defiance attempts to expose illogical classroom rules and culture, which erase young selves. Systemic transformation, not child correction, is essential.

“A rich, rigorous, and engaging curriculum that values creativity and multiple ways of knowing is juxtaposed with a consistent and sometimes harsh reminder that there are rigid rules, norms, codes of behavior, that mustn’t be challenged if one wants to be successful in this setting.”

Shalaby contends that paradoxes undergird even progressive school spaces. While Forest School’s curriculum may celebrate diverse learners, its practices and rules breed a climate of control. Teachers enforce this control through public scolding, which engenders trauma, rebellion, and erasure of rights. Inviting multidimensional ways of knowing while prohibiting free movement and choice strands children in limbo by requiring that they choose between acceptance and authentic identity—exactly the choice that the school claims to sidestep.

“Though her skin color makes her highly visible, classroom social life carries on as if she’s not there. It seems the more she feels left out and invisible, the more she engages in behavior that actively draws the attention of others.”

Shalaby theorizes that Zora’s attention-seeking behaviors are a desperate bid for inclusion, especially of racially marginalized students. As Ann Arnett Ferguson theorized of such “tactical performativity,” provocation secures the visibility denied to marginalized people while also prompting surveillance. Shalaby positions Zora’s defiance as an urgent call to investigate deficient classroom community.

“Because her [Zora’s] transgressions and the resulting redirection were often loud and public, daily and ongoing, her reputation as public enemy—in the eyes of her peers, especially—went unchallenged.”

Shalaby spotlights vicious cycles binding “troublemakers.” Public punishment serves as fuel to these students’ reputations, as peers witness the public reprimands. However, attention-seeking behaviors in fact escalate in response to social exclusion. Shalaby indicts the school culture that produces this situation, repositioning “troublemakers” as authentically nonconforming.

“[Zora’s] home is wonderfully chaotic: busy, active, hectic, lived-in, alive. It is the very opposite of mundane. These are not people trying to fit in. But in her school life, Zora is encouraged to conform.”

In a passage that illustrates The Clash Between the Cultures of Home and School, Shalaby contrasts Zora’s lively home—one embracing cultural identity—with sterile school demands to mute difference. Vibrant chaos signals Zora’s full humanity; conformity directives at odds with her upbringing spell trauma.

“Rather than conform, these two [Zora’s parents] leverage the act of being out-standing as a response to hostility, fully embracing a life and identity at the margins. Coming of age in spaces where people of color were the majority, they enjoyed a sense of belonging in their formative years that ultimately bolstered the development of their strong, proud, and lively personalities.”

Shalaby traces the wisdom Zora’s marginalized parents pass on. Zora’s parents teach her the survival strategy of boldly standing out. In doing so, they resist the erasure of the vibrant difference and creative passion that schools often code as unacceptable otherness. They celebrate belonging to community and self, just as Shalaby feels schools themselves should.

“As the medication calms her and she increasingly learns to fit the school norm as the years go by, I lament the potential loss of fun. What if things get dreary?”

Shalaby suggests that there is a dark underbelly to psychiatric intervention for “troublemakers.” ADHD diagnoses and medication are rising among children. Muting Zora’s dramatic personality may be easier for the school, but it threatens her with the loss of self. Shalaby here lays out the cost of coerced conformity: joyless dreariness and social death.

“For a child like Lucas, who experiences most of his own interests as urgent, internalizing and adapting to school culture is no easy feat. Rules don’t seem fair because they often stand in the way of meeting his [Lucas’s] individual desires.”

Shalaby suggests that silencing particular children under the guise of majority benefit comes at a cost. Lucas naturally resists any dictates he sees as thwarting his “urgent” personal interests. His selfhood clashes with regimentation that privileges mass compliance over individual expression.

“Rules exist to maintain order and sanity in a room full of more than twenty children, and they are designed to prioritize the mass—not the individual and his own preferences.”

The tension between the individual and the community is a recurrent theme in Troublemakers, but Shalaby ultimately suggests the choice is a false one. A truly community-oriented classroom would not scapegoat individuals but recognize that misbehavior stems from collective failings. In this way, it would serve individuals better than the current system.

“Being an entertainer—both by accident and on purpose—is a strategy he [Lucas] draws on often, even as it gets him into trouble. On these occasions his desire for belonging and social approval seems to outweigh the risks of punishment.”

Here, Shalaby gives a human face to the social hunger that she argues drives many classroom disruptions. Lucas risks punishment to play class clown, briefly claiming the spotlight. For Lucas, even a fleeting feeling of belonging outweighs the penalty. This suggests that a state of exclusion is “normal” in the classroom; attention-seeking behaviors, Shalaby suggests, demand an investigation into deficient community bonds.

“His [Lucas’s] mother, especially, felt that other parents often worked hard to insist on their children’s perfection, and she experienced empowerment when she could understand Lucas’s conditions and respond to them proactively and with the help of medical doctors and his teachers.”

Shalaby spotlights Lucas’s mother’s embrace of Lucas’s potential medicalized conformity. Shalaby suggests that in allying with clinicians who view nonconformists as disordered, Lucas’s mother is responding to her own form of social ostracism. However, her own efforts to conform may come at the cost of diminishing Lucas’s humanity by undercutting what makes him unique.

“This most basic requirement of school—trading your own desires for the requirements of the teacher—may be part of a “hidden curriculum,” but Lucas makes it quite visible in his transgressions and often displays his hurt through anger and frustration.”

Shalaby here plays on the idea that schools teach a “hidden” curriculum enforcing adult power to spotlight the cost of such mandates. Lucas loudly resists the demand to erase oneself, exposing the violence of such requests.

“Educators are not medical doctors; they cannot diagnose or treat ADHD in individual children. But context matters to a child’s ability and willingness to stay focused, and this makes educators powerful actors.”

Shalaby warns that medicalizing defiance obscures educators’ responsibility in creating or addressing conditions that stifle students. “Troublemakers” reveal not individual illness but environments that traumatize young spirits. By contrast, Shalaby suggests, healing spaces engage children’s brilliance, embracing diverse minds and bodies while eradicating barriers to access and belonging.

“Punishment for willful defiance does not only violate the individual civil rights of young people. It also threatens democracy more broadly.”

Shalaby warns that suppressing defiance threatens civil society. Democracy depends on questioning its own hierarchies and contesting arbitrary authority. Schools that suppress dissent create adult citizens unable to challenge illegitimate or imbalanced power. Freedom lies in teaching youth to collectively and ethically resist exploitation.

“Students do well in school and will be counted as good when they allow others to exercise power over them. Those who resist this narrow definition of what it means to be good are excluded from the community of goodness more broadly.”

Shalaby exposes the circular injustice that associates “goodness” with obedience, manufacturing consent through threat of exclusion. This leaves dissenting children literally stranded outside classroom community. They find their otherness both pathologized and punished. More broadly, Shalaby indicts schools’ sacrifice of empowered citizenship on the altar of worker-learner compliance. As schools are responsible for freedom’s future, Shalaby demands that they probe the social roots of defiance and honor this resistance through restorative healing.

“Schools engender trouble by using systems of reward and punishment to create a certain kind of person—‘a good student’—a person suited for the culture of schooling. Good students sit still; they listen; they follow directions; they conform; they take orders; they adhere to the terms and standards of childhood as a marginal social position and to whiteness as the ideal.”

Shalaby describes how school rituals can traumatize students. “Good” students surrender agency—including over their own bodies—in a way that is antithetical to human expression. Children who refuse this conditioning face exclusion that is framed as their own choice. This in turn obscures that it is their nonconforming selves, not unacceptable behaviors, that spur their exclusion.

“By excluding trouble, schools hope to erase it. Schools gain their legitimacy from the appearance of goodness, from the willingness of their students to behave well, to work well, to score well.”

Shalaby describes a kind of school legitimacy that hinges on projecting an image of behavioral conformity and student achievement. Underperforming “troublemakers” jeopardize this pretense, so they are rendered invisible. Such erasure dehumanizes rather than supports these students.

“School is generally understood to deliver instructional content to children, arming them with the knowledge and competencies required for a future in the job market. Teachers often believe this work is neutral, shaped by objective standards rather than subjective values. But schools make people.”

Shalaby rejects the idea that schools are politically neutral sites of factual instruction, foregrounding their power for identity construction. The work of classrooms lies not simply in instilling skills but in shaping students—currently, Shalaby argues, in ways that privilege subordination and standardization. “Troublemakers” reveal this work through their nonconformity, which implicitly insists on forging a more liberated self.