47 pages • 1 hour read
Carla ShalabyTroublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Conclusion-NoteChapter Summaries & Analyses
Conclusion Summary: “Trouble-Making in School”
Shalaby notes that were one only to view the subjects of her research in school, the “troublemaker” label might seem fitting. At home, however, their full humanity becomes clear. Shalaby therefore argues that schools themselves engender trouble by creating the categories of “good” and “bad” students and subjecting the latter to exclusion in an attempt to erase nonconformity and defiance. However, excluded children respond by disrupting more forcefully, making themselves hypervisible to resist invisibility.
This is not a problem of individual schools but rather of school culture writ large, which approaches students as people in the making rather than as humans who already have distinct personalities, preferences, histories, etc. What’s more, the idea that school prepares students for “life” does not resonate with children, as attending school is all they know of life. Shalaby argues that students are the classroom’s “native” residents and teachers the interlopers who threaten the classroom’s sense of community by wielding exclusion as punishment.
Though inappropriate in execution, the willful behavior of “troublemakers” asserts their presence and voices their need for community, attention, and self-determination. Rather than changing children, particularly through medication that could have serious long-term consequences on their minds and bodies, Shalaby calls for radically reimagining education along lines of power sharing, caring, and inclusion.
A Letter to Teachers Summary: “On Teaching Love and Learning Freedom”
Shalaby argues that typical classroom management advice fails because it relies on technical tips rather than on recognizing teaching’s human, relational essence, which involves power and identity. She calls not for more strategies but for a mindset shift: Teachers should “be love” by honoring children’s dignity and personhood. More specifically, they should be “public love,” by which Shalaby means “fierce,” “political” love that demands more just conditions, not superficial niceties. Classrooms can model this love, preparing children to create a world without cruelty.
When facing troublemakers, Shalaby therefore urges teachers to ask how they can respond in loving ways, healing community connections rather than punishing individuals with isolation. The “regular” response excludes and erases defiant students, teaching prison culture, not freedom. By contrast, the “loving” response considers troublemaking a symptom of broader harm, invites student expertise about their own needs, understands misbehavior in terms of societal problems, and holds public dialogues to understand and address shared struggles. Shalaby suggests that such an approach might reveal that Marcus’s apparent anger is really fear of the deadly consequences of being mislabeled “bad” in a racist culture. With love, the class could then discuss how to alleviate the root causes triggering him.
Such teaching is unfamiliar and hard, but Shalaby believes children’s unrestrained imaginations can serve as guideposts. Classrooms don’t have to reflect current reality; they can model humanitarian possibilities, and Shalaby urges teachers to let children practice the listening, healing, and freedom of literacy skills required in a just world.
A Note to All Readers Summary: “On Mushrooms, Mold, and Mice”
Writing from her Detroit home, Shalaby considers the city’s poverty and the way in which governmental neglect forces residents to take care of one another. She discusses the 2016 teachers’ strike; previously forbidden from even photographing classrooms, teachers spoke out about the literal toxicity in their schools, including mold and mice feces. Shalaby connects these conditions to the deeper problem of racialized disposability: Society simply does not value children without means and children of color. Shalaby argues that Detroit shows how people teach love and learn freedom through visionary resistance. She calls readers to join “troublemaking” teachers who are bravely making visible society’s assaults on their students and collectively refusing systems that sacrifice young lives.
Conclusion-Note Analysis
The bulk of Shalaby’s book consists of vignettes of and meditations on the four students she profiles. While the chapters devoted to Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus certainly contain claims about the state of education and suggestions about alternative directions, they are relatively light on argumentation and (especially) theoretical context. The Conclusion marks a turn in this respect. It reiterates Shalaby’s call to radically reimagine school environments so that they embrace diverse young spirits rather than crush nonconformists in a quest for order. It also recapitulates Shalaby’s claim that rebellious children offer lessons in freedom, power sharing, healing, and human dignity that schools have yet to realize. Shalaby thus summarizes what she has learned from her subjects and positions it in explicitly persuasive form. To bolster her case, Shalaby also turns to other experts in pedagogy; the idea of children as the classroom’s endemic people is one Shalaby borrows from Duncan-Andrade.
The turn toward overt argumentation continues in the Letter and Note that follow. These chapters encapsulate Shalaby’s concept of “public love”—a love that at times invites conflict in the service of community healing. Shalaby contrasts this definition with one equating love with superficial kindness. Although she frames her suggestions for teachers as matters of “being” rather than “doing,” her conception of love is thus quite active, and her tips for teachers are tangible. Above all, she recommends engaging students in classroom-wide discussions of the roots of so-called misbehavior. By virtue of involving the entire class, this approach implicitly positions troublemaking as a community rather than an individual problem—one of Shalaby’s core claims.
In addressing the layperson, the Note pulls back from concrete suggestions for the classroom to contextualize Shalaby’s claims about the US educational system. As Shalaby notes in the Conclusion, the problems she highlights are not unique to the Crossroads School or the Forest School; if anything, she observes, those schools stand out for their relative progressivism, not to mention the resources they make available to both students and teachers. Though Shalaby only touches briefly on the Detroit school system, their impoverishment contrasts starkly with the schools Shalaby has so far profiled. Here too, however, Shalaby suggests continuity: The literal toxicity of Detroit’s schools manifests the disposability of human life in the US, particularly when that life belongs to someone who is without means and/or a person of color. Just as “troublemakers” signal problems affecting the wider student body, Shalaby therefore positions Detroit schools as “canaries in the coal mine” for the broader educational system. Nevertheless, Shalaby ends on a hopeful note. The Detroit schools are unique not only because of governmental neglect but also because of educator passion. The Detroit teachers’ collective strike rejects the sacrifice of children and practices public love by fighting for students’ basic humanity. In this, they model the critical awareness, commitment to freedom and justice, and sense of care and community that Shalaby hopes all teachers and readers will embrace.
