Why Schools Confuse Obedience With Learning

Engagement Isn’t Compliance – Episode 1: Why Schools Confuse Obedience with Learning

In the first episode of Engagement Isn’t Compliance, host David Schmidt Jiménez — a late-diagnosed autistic English Language Development teacher — reflects on how compliance-based schooling failed him, and how it continues to fail multilingual learners, autistic students, and children living in poverty.

David unpacks why schools so often mistake obedience for learning, drawing from his own experiences as a student who was labeled lazy, disobedient, and unmotivated — not because he couldn’t learn, but because he refused to comply with systems that didn’t make sense. He explores how memorization, punishment, and the “banking model” of education dehumanize students by treating them as empty vess ...