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 vessels instead of meaning-makers.

This episode examines:

• Why questioning authority is often misread as defiance
• How multilingual learners and autistic students are labeled “unmotivated”
• How poverty turns compliance into a survival strategy
• The long-term cost of obedience-based schooling, including school-to-prison, school-to-poverty, and school-to-addiction pipelines
• Why self-determination theory (autonomy, belonging, competence) explains what actually drives engagement and learning

David also reflects on how compliance records — attendance, grades, behavior — can quietly close doors to opportunity, and why he now teaches students how to survive within the system without losing themselves.

This episode is a call to rehumanize education — to center connection, community, and care instead of control.

Engagement isn’t compliance. Engagement is connection.