Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Content Warning: This section contains discussions of racism.

A central theme in Troublemakers is the way that mainstream school culture demands strict conformity and obedience from students. Dress codes, speech rules, restrictive movement regulations, and narrow social interaction norms all serve this end, enforcing an idea of discipline and uniformity that transcends any particular rule. Students who fail or refuse to comply with schools’ stringent demands face punishments ranging from public scolding to outright removal from the classroom community. Shalaby asserts that such exclusion is “a way to cement the identity of a child as a troublemaker” (152); by locating the problem in the individual, schools assert the cohesion of the remainder of the classroom. At the same time, schools in effect engender “trouble” by establishing these rigid, limiting expectations for conduct and decorum, as all nonconformity becomes a problem. Shalaby suggests that creative, questioning students like Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus are the collateral damage of this vicious cycle.

Shalaby’s imagery of songbirds in captivity suggests that there is something inherently cruel and deadening about “caging” children’s spirits with strict codes of conduct. Sean bluntly encapsulates school’s hidden curriculum: “You’re supposed to just do everything” (110). However, Shalaby implies that in practice, much of the problem with demands for conformity lies in the cultural biases that often underpin schools’ definitions of acceptable behavior, speech, appearance, and social conduct. Environments privileging white middle-class norms spark conflict with students coming from different cultural backgrounds or with different developmental needs. Such schools reward assimilation while discouraging difference through punishments that range from public scolding to expulsion. The demand for cultural homogeneity takes many forms, including insistence on standard English rather than home dialects and dress codes that ban particular cultural expressions. As Shalaby’s discussion of the Forest School reveals, even seemingly progressive schools with dynamic curricula can perpetuate a “white-bread American” culture that marginalizes students of color (7). In all cases, Shalaby argues, the policing of difference engenders trauma and resistance: Restrictive regulation breeds both spiritual wounds and school-to-prison pipelines as nonconformists refuse attempts to erase their personhood.

The book ties this examination of conformity to an exploration of the simultaneous dynamics of social invisibility and heightened visibility that often trouble marginalized students. Zora’s biracial identity and class background make her an outlier at her nearly all-white suburban school. Her silliness and drama garner attention—a way of coping with her social isolation—even as they reinforce her difference by earning her the label of “troublemaker.” Teachers’ efforts to redirect her toward conformity and silence therefore fall flat, as they fail to recognize that these would merely be new forms of invisibility.

By tracing exclusion and “invisibility” as consequences of conformity, Shalaby implicates the behavioral control embedded in school culture as a barrier to belonging. Her “troublemaker” portraits expose dynamics that deny children, especially marginalized children, their rights to be seen, heard, and embraced in public school classrooms.