Carla Shalaby

“requires that we call ourselves out in order to call others in.18 It requires that we be willing to confront one another, and that we be willing to listen generously when we are being confronted—letting go of our personal feelings for a commitment, instead, to the shared goal of freedom.”
― Carla Shalaby, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

“Similarly, Jackson provides a theoretical understanding of Lucas’s difficulty sharing space. He names four key features of school life: delay, denial, interruption, and social distraction. And he writes, “Each is produced, in part, by the crowded conditions of the classroom.”12 These four features require that children—even very young children, whom we know to be active and impatient—wait a whole lot, get denied the choice of their own work, get interrupted from their own play, and become distracted by the requirement to be with others socially only at “appropriate” and designated times. These are all normalized school demands and they are largely considered unproblematic, even as we make such demands of five- and six-year-olds, whom we know to be naturally unsuited to them. The fact that the demands are considered normal makes them hidden, part of a neutral and unproblematic school culture. This invisibility draws us to the conclusion that classroom life is regular and children who don’t comply with it are irregular. Thus we rely on changing children rather than changing classroom demands.”
― Carla Shalaby, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School