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Engagement Isn't Compliance

Engagement Isn't Compliance

Von: David Schmidt-Jimenez
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Engagement Isn’t Compliance

A podcast—and a community—for people schools were never built for.

Schools often say they want engagement. What they usually mean is quiet, compliant, and easy to manage.

This podcast starts from a different truth.

Engagement Isn’t Compliance is a reflective, narrative-driven podcast about school, language, disability, and poverty—told from lived experience at the margins. Hosted by David Schmidt, a late-diagnosed autistic, Cuban-American ESOL teacher and advocate, the show explores what happens when we stop confusing obedience with learning, masking with professionalism, and “rigor” with harm.

These episodes are not how-to lessons or quick takes. They’re slower conversations about:

  • What it means to teach and learn while autistic, multilingual, and poor
  • How masking shows up in classrooms, staff meetings, and “professionalism”
  • Why multilingual learners and disabled students are disciplined, mislabeled, and misunderstood
  • How Self-Determination (autonomy, competence, belonging) gets crushed by control-based systems
  • And why so many students—and educators—burn out while being told they just need more grit

If you’ve ever felt like school demanded you perform instead of exist— If you’ve been told you were “capable” but never actually supported— If you’re tired of fixing kids instead of fixing systems—

You’re in the right place.

This isn’t about compliance. It’s about dignity, access, and self-determination.

David William Schmidt
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  • Why Schools Confuse Obedience With Learning

    Why Schools Confuse Obedience With Learning
    Jan 12 2026

    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.
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    28 Min.
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