Hegemony, Labels, and Education

"The troublemakers—rejected and criminalized—are the children from whom we can learn the most about freedom."

In the Preface and Introduction to Trouble Makers: Lessons in Freedom from Young School Children by Carla Shalaby, Shalaby argues that the expectations that have been normalized within formal education are antithetical to the natural impulses of children, resulting in student alienation and the "systematic maintenance of the racialized American caste system." In detailing the experience of four school-aged children, Shalaby advocates for the need for schools to be places where students "can learn, together, how to skillfully insist on their right to be treated as free people" rather than complacent followers of the current social order, to learn how to be agents of freedom and change.

Notable Quotes:

• "Our schools are designed to prepare children to take their assumed place in the social order rather than to question and challenge that order. Because we train youth in the image of capitalism instead of a vision of freedom—for lives as individual workers rather than solidary human beings—young people are taught academic content that can be drilled and tested rather than understanding literacies and numeracies as forms of power, tools for organizing, fodder for the development of their own original ideas." 

• "…the demands of school seem increasingly antithetical to how children be in the world. With these youngest of people, the desire for self-directed learning is fierce…[t]hey tirelessly refuse, protest, and question. No and why are the favored words of the little ones. School does not welcome this protest, this natural way of childhood. As soon as they cross the threshold of a school building, increasingly under the gaze of surveillance cameras, police officers, and metal detectors in our city schools, they are expected to know a lot about social control and accept the fact of it."
• This reminds me of the Delpit reading and the culture of power, as schools are often perceived as training grounds for children to adapt and conform to the norms of the hegemonic culture.

• "Everyone is at the ready to catch children doing the wrong thing. Unquestioning deference to authority is the requirement and expectation of school, where adult directives replace children's own desires."

• "…there are only three institutions from which Americans are allowed no escape: prisons, mental hospitals, and schools."
• There's a very clear and telling throughline between each of these institutions, especially when thinking about the nature of the school-to-prison pipeline.

• "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 my brief but ongoing tenure as a middle school teacher, I observed students' hesitancy with choice time, minimal direction, and a lack of formalized instruction. I fear that my school's rigid structure has stunted many students, inhibiting them from forming a sense of independence. Students either take things too far or do nothing at all, exhibiting signs of functional freeze and lack of self-assurance.