Troublemakers

1. Troublemakers as Canaries: Warning of Toxic School Environments

I think of the children who make trouble at school as miners’ canaries.

Canaries in the mine. Children identified as "troublemakers" are like the canaries miners once took into coal mines; their distress signals the presence of a toxic environment. Their disruptive behaviors are not just personal flaws but loud warnings that something is wrong in the school's air, indicating harms that less sensitive children might tolerate but which are detrimental nonetheless. Instead of blaming the canaries for their suffering, we should heed their warnings and examine the environment causing their distress.

Heeding the signal. These children, often labeled as angry, disturbed, or out of control, are struggling for visibility and voice in a system that seeks to silence them. Their misbehavior is a symptom of their sensitivity to the restrictive, controlling, and often joyless atmosphere of school. By focusing solely on punishing the child, schools miss the opportunity to identify and address the underlying systemic issues that are harmful to all children.

Toxic conditions. The "poison" in the school environment includes demands for excessive stillness, irrelevant academic tasks, lack of free play, limited opportunities for meaningful relationships, and an emphasis on conformity over individual expression. Children like Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus, through their struggles, highlight these pervasive issues. Their suffering serves as a critical alert, urging educators and parents to clean the air rather than condemn the children breathing it.

2. Schools Prioritize Conformity Over Freedom and Love

We rarely hear the words freedom and love in our private conversations and public discourses on schooling...

Missing concepts. Freedom and love are conspicuously absent from discussions about school reform, which instead focus on standards, accountability, and control. Education is treated as a technical enterprise of management and measurement, overlooking the crucial human dimensions shaped by intimate relationships and community building. This narrow focus often pathologizes children who don't fit the norm, rewarding teachers who suppress disruptive behavior.

Humanistic education. The author argues for "teaching love and learning freedom" as core tenets of education, emphasizing deeply relational and respectful endeavors. Love should permeate teacher-student relationships, fostering a sense of being seen and worthy, while classrooms should be spaces where children practice freedom, treated with dignity as free persons. Schools should function as microcosms of authentic democracy, allowing children to voice their needs and identities.

Countercultural vision. This vision is countercultural to how schools are traditionally organized, where quiet children are valued over loud ones, and adults are the sole authorities. Schools often prepare children for a predetermined place in the social order rather than empowering them to question and challenge it. Prioritizing freedom means reimagining classroom rules, pedagogies, and power structures to honor the diverse ways children exist and learn.

3. The "Hidden Curriculum" Demands Obedience and Self-Regulation

Unquestioning deference to authority is the requirement and the expectation of school...

Implicit rules. Beyond the formal curriculum, schools teach a "hidden curriculum" centered on social control and conformity. Children quickly learn that adult directives replace their own desires, and that obedience is paramount. This is evident in practices like:

• Requiring children to sit still for long periods
• Limiting free play and self-directed learning
• Expecting silence and passive listening
• Punishing questioning and protest

Training for compliance. From the moment they enter school, often under surveillance, children are expected to accept social control. Teachers are trained in classroom management techniques that prioritize control and use reward/punishment systems, sometimes more suited for training animals than educating free human beings. This prepares children to take their assumed place in the social order, valuing individual compliance over collective agency.

Internalizing norms. Children internalize these norms, as seen in a second grader drawing obedient pupils for the word "obedience." The expectation is that children will learn to employ their executive powers in the service of the teacher's desires rather than their own, even if it is difficult or goes against their nature. This fundamental requirement of school life is often invisible because of its everyday normalcy, making children who struggle with it seem inherently problematic.

4. Discipline Often Leads to Exclusion and Invisibility

...the policies and practices that we use to discipline children—starting in the earliest grades—have the potential to set off the first in a long line of falling dominoes that might end in a young person facing the direst of circumstances.

Pathologizing difference. Children who are unwilling or unable to comply with school norms are quickly labeled as problems and subjected to mechanisms for identifying deficits. This often begins a cycle of marginalization and exclusion, including:

• Time-outs and detentions
• Segregated remediation
• Suspensions and expulsions (even in preschool)
• Referrals for testing, labels, and medication

Cycle of disadvantage. Exclusionary discipline removes children from academic instruction, causing them to fall further behind, which can lead to more misbehavior and further exclusion. This contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately impacting children of color. Withholding education becomes a tool to maintain a social underclass, echoing historical injustices where teaching literacy to enslaved people was forbidden as it was a form of power.

Threat to belonging. Even non-physical forms of exclusion, like time-out desks or being sent to the principal's office, hinder children's access to content and threaten their sense of belonging. These practices, common even in well-resourced schools, are considered acceptable responses to misbehavior. However, they teach children that their worthiness of inclusion is conditional on their compliance, rather than an inherent right.

5. Race and Class Intersect with School Discipline and Belonging

...the ongoing supremacy of whiteness is arguably the most toxic of poisons in the air of our school buildings.

Disproportionate impact. Data shows that children of color, particularly black preschoolers, are suspended at significantly higher rates than their white peers, highlighting the racialized application of discipline. This disproportionate impact implicates schools in maintaining the racialized American caste system, pushing out children of color and hindering their access to educational power.

Cultural clash. In predominantly white, affluent schools like Forest School, there are clear cultural norms reflecting upper-class academia and white professionalism. Children who cannot or will not adhere to these standards are flagged as problematic. Teachers, even those aware of racial dynamics, may enforce these norms believing they are preparing children of color for success in a white-dominated world, potentially leading to cultural "watering down."

Visibility and judgment. Children of color may already stand out due to their race, and their noncompliant behavior can make them even more hypervisible, leading peers to form negative judgments based on racial associations. Teachers' worries about this dynamic can lead to stricter enforcement of conformity, inadvertently reinforcing the idea that difference is problematic and hindering genuine belonging for children who are already marginalized by identity.

6. Children's Behavior is a Response to Context and Unmet Needs

But behaviors are social actions—they happen within social interactions—and children’s behavior is a response to context regardless of whether that response is voluntary or involuntary, intentional or unintentional.

Beyond pathology. While some children may have diagnoses or inherent traits that make compliance difficult, their behavior is fundamentally a response to the social and cultural conditions of school. The demands for stillness, quiet, and conformity can exacerbate natural childhood tendencies like high energy, curiosity, and a desire for autonomy. Framing behavior solely as an individual deficit ignores the environmental factors at play.

Seeking connection and control. Children's misbehavior often stems from unmet needs for connection, control, or understanding. Zora's antics seek attention and belonging; Lucas's inflexibility clashes with rigid rules; Sean's questioning challenges authority; Marcus's disruptions demand to be seen and known as a person. These actions, however disruptive, are attempts to navigate a system that often disregards their individual needs and desires.

Situational struggle. A child who struggles in the highly structured, crowded environment of school might thrive in a different context with more freedom, space, and personalized attention. Lucas's "internal" issues are starkly visible in school but less so at home or during free play. Sean's "boyish energy" is problematic in a quiet classroom but normal on a playground. Recognizing behavior as situational calls for changing school environments, not just children.

7. Willful Defiance as Agency and a Call for Questioning

Being a leader is being rebellious against unfair rules.

Challenging authority. Acts of "willful defiance," like talking back or refusing directives, are often punished severely, particularly for children of color. However, these behaviors can also be interpreted as exercises of agency and free will. Children like Sean, who tirelessly question and challenge authority, are refusing to accept subordination without justification.

Democracy requires dispute. While challenging authority is often seen as problematic in school, it is a crucial habit for a healthy democracy. Knowing when and how to challenge unfair rules and systems is a skill worth cultivating. Schools that punish questioning and reward unquestioning obedience prepare children for a hierarchical social order, not for active, engaged citizenship.

Cultivating leadership. Sean's persistent questioning, though exhausting for teachers, shows potential for a feisty, politically active citizen. Instead of punishing his disputes, schools could teach him strategic ways to challenge authority, including community organizing and thoughtful debate. Reframing his behavior as potential leadership could also address his feelings of exclusion and his heartbreaking sense that "nobody cares."

8. Children Seek Belonging and Visibility, Often Through Disruption

The more you refuse to hear my voice, the louder I will sing.

The need to be seen. Children, being human, require and thrive on attention—loving, generous, patient attention where they feel seen and understood. In crowded, sterile school environments where they are expected to pay attention rather than get it, children often resort to disruptive behaviors to make themselves visible. This is particularly true for children who feel marginalized or invisible due to difference.

Paradox of attention. Children like Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus become hypervisible through their antics, constantly drawing the teacher's attention, often negatively. Yet, this hypervisibility as "troublemakers" can make them invisible as complex human beings with other identities and needs. Their efforts to be seen often result in further exclusion, as teachers remove them to avoid disrupting others, creating a cycle where misbehavior leads to isolation, which fuels more misbehavior.

Risking punishment for connection. These children are willing to risk punishment and strain their relationships with teachers to carve out moments of belonging or gain attention from peers. Zora's entertaining antics, Lucas's clowning, Sean's obsession with Ilan, and Marcus's provocative disruptions are all attempts to connect, get a laugh, or feel accepted. Their misbehavior is a strategy for visibility and belonging in a system that otherwise renders them unseen and unheard.

9. Relationships and Being Known are Fundamental Human Needs

Marcus was asking to be cared about as a person, not as a student.

Beyond academic roles. While schools focus on academic rigor and student performance, children fundamentally need to be known and cared for as people. Marcus, despite his disruptive behavior, consistently sought authentic human connection, valuing relationships over academic tasks. His interactions with counselors and the principal, whose roles involved listening and healing, were often more positive than those with his teacher, whose role emphasized academic compliance.

The power of care. Marcus's deep empathy and desire to be helpful, seen in his comforting crying peers or wanting to help in kindergarten, highlight his need for caring relationships. His remorse after hurting others and his earnest apologies when not forced demonstrate a capacity for connection. His demand to be known and valued as a person, not just a student or a problem, is a call for schools to prioritize human connection.

Conflicting values. Emily's emphasis on independence clashed with Marcus's need for interdependence and help. His attempts to enlist adult assistance, often seen as manipulative, stemmed from a desire for connection and support. The eventual recommendation for a full-time paraprofessional, while providing the physical presence he craved, risks reinforcing a dynamic of dependence rather than fostering genuine, reciprocal relationships where he can also be the helper.

10. Reframing Behavior: From Problem Children to Troubled Systems

No child is naturally a troublemaker.

Trouble is made. The term "troublemaker" labels a child, locating the problem within the individual. However, trouble is actively made through the interaction between a child's natural ways of being and the rigid, often inhospitable, arrangements of school. Schools engender trouble by demanding conformity, exclude it by marginalizing those who resist, and try to erase it by making noncompliant children invisible, sometimes through medication.

Systemic issues. The struggles of Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus highlight systemic flaws:

• The conflict between home values (uniqueness, questioning, freedom, interdependence) and school values (conformity, obedience, control, independence).
• The racial and class biases embedded in behavioral norms and discipline.
• The lack of space for children's natural energy, curiosity, and need for connection.
• The failure to see behavior as communication of unmet needs or responses to stress.

A call for change. Instead of focusing on "fixing" children assumed to be broken, the focus should shift to addressing the harms within the school system. This requires:

• Prioritizing love and freedom in educational practice.
• Cultivating questioning and agency, not just obedience.
• Ensuring belonging is an absolute right, not a conditional privilege.
• Making children fully visible, seen, heard, and valued as complex human beings.

These children, like canaries, urge us to transform schools into places where all children can breathe freely and where trouble-making is understood as a signal for necessary change.

Last updated: May 3, 2025