Raising Free People

Akilah S. Richards

Description

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money.

Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process.

Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children.

In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

Sujets

• Decolonization
• Autonomy
• Unschooling
• Homeschooling

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638492
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Raising Free People is the book that those of us navigating unschooling through a decolonisation and social justice lens have been waiting for. Akilah s straight up rich and honest descriptions and insights on the many highs and lows of living with authenticity and raising free people resonate completely. There are so many What? How did I not notice that before? moments. It is priceless that we get to journey with the Richards as they navigate overcoming their schoolishness and fears about liberation and community, accompanied by the insight, guidance, and encouragement of constantly checking their mindsets to do the inner liberation work to make the outer liberation a reality.
-Zakiyya Ismail, convener of the Learning Reimagined Unschooling Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa
This is an insightful, brilliant book by one of today s most inspiring leaders in the realm of Self-Directed Education. We see here how respecting children, listening to them, and learning from them can revolutionize our manner of parenting and remove the blinders imposed by the forced schooling that we nearly all experienced. I recommend it to everyone who cares about children, freedom, and the future of humanity.
-Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College, author of Free to Learn
It s becoming more common for parents to recognize the inefficiencies and irrelevance of conventional schooling and to desire something better for their children. Yet few have had the courage and commitment to forge a new path for their family based on freedom, liberation, autonomy, and love like Akilah S. Richards. Even fewer have been able to share such deep insights and empowering narratives about reclaiming our lives and trusting our children to create their own.
-Tomis Parker, agile learning facilitator at ALC Mosaic and board member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education
Akilah s voice is so warm and personal that sometimes I don t notice how seriously radical and impactful her words are-that is, until I catch myself speaking and listening to my own child with noticeably more humility, curiosity, and respect. Raising Free People pulls off that rare miracle: it s a book for everyone, offering fresh and significant insights to people like me who ve spent decades learning about unschooling, while simultaneously welcoming and engaging the parent who has never previously stopped to question the validity or importance of school. Akilah s vision is unsurpassed when it comes to drawing the connections between collective liberation and personal freedom. Her clarity on this and similar issues has already deepened the communal wisdom of the Self-Directed Education movement, and I hope that her book reaches millions of parents, so that millions of children may grow up knowing, trusting, and fully inhabiting their own unique gifts.
-Grace Llewellyn, founder of Not Back to School Camp, author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook
It is uplifting to experience this message delivered with such clarity and in such a practical and inviting manner that it will naturally encourage and draw families to want to take this first step toward living this. I want to thank Akilah for this and encourage any families that are thinking more about learning to raise free adults to jump right in and take this journey of learning with Akilah. Her care, empathy, presence, and insight are at the very forefront of how families can experience living together in a healthy, integrated, and harmonious manner, where learning is an ongoing journey to deepening their connections.
-George Kaponay, world traveler, storyteller, writer, social entrepreneur, and cofounder of the Family Adventure Academy

Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work
2020 Akilah S. Richards
This edition 2020 PM Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-861-4 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-833-1 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-849-2 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934742
Cover by Kris Richards
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Contents
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Beginning Our Process from Being Schoolish to Becoming Self-directed
CHAPTER TWO
Using Mad Question-Askin to Finally Start Changing Your Parenting Approach
CHAPTER THREE
How Freedom from Schooling Made Room for Affordable, Extensive Travel (and Brand-New Parenting Fears)
CHAPTER FOUR
The Shift in Power That Eventually Rooted Us in Unschooling
Three Mistakes Parents Make When Teaching Consent and Bodily Autonomy-and How to Fix Them
CHAPTER FIVE
Birth of a Postcolonial Perspective on Parenting
CHAPTER SIX
Recognizing Unschooling as a Communal Model for Collective, Long-Term Liberation
Fare of the Free Child , Episode 0
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leadership: The One-Word Bridge between Learning and Liberation
CHAPTER EIGHT
Living Examples of How Deschooling Helps Us Cocreate the Cultures We Need
CHAPTER NINE
A History of Trust Issues and Ways to Leverage Language
CHAPTER TEN
Patois-Inspired Solutions to Your Fiercest Parenting Critic Problems
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Being Willing to Be Called In, and Out, by Children
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Foreword
On the twenty-fifth morning of March 2020, the year of the pandemic, a billion Indian households awoke to the skin-curdlingly unsettling roars of horned monsters, the kinds that modern legends warned dwelled under the beds of scared little children. These monsters were, however, of a different sort: they were in the beds of their children. As a matter of fact, they were their children .
Horned monsters? you ask. Well, forgive my embellishments, but they might as well have been floating spaghetti heptapods with tentacles for eyes or something far less bizarre. What matters, what my point is, is that those parents must have stared awkwardly at their own kids as anomalous entities, like things squirted out of the twilight zone.
In the wake of the exponential explosion of the novel coronavirus, nicknamed SARS-CoV-2, and following the social distancing protocols other nation-states under siege had executed to combat the pandemic, India made the unprecedented decision to shut down its economy. Flights were cancelled. The food production and distribution cycles dried up. Local kiosks were shut down by cane-brandishing police officers. Schools were ordered closed. More than a billion people were ordered to observe difficult lockdown procedures. For most parents, suddenly being at home with their own children during what was normally school hours was an existential crisis that would quickly capture the imagination of the educationally conservative country.
For my wife and me, unschooling parents of our two children, it was Wednesday.
Word travels fast in the electrifying atmosphere of a crisis. We were soon contacted by a journalist from the country s most prestigious daily, and then by another from another daily. Their questions were similar: What do mothers do with their children during the lockdown? Do you have suggestions about exercises to offer or how to keep our children productive?
My wife Ijeoma, an Indian brought up in this bureaucratic culture where the primacy of schooling was as unquestionable as the popularity of cricket, showed me the questions in her inbox. We chuckled at the mainstream anxiety about childhood productivity: our own concerns were often how to escape the unquenchably demanding prolificity of our never-schooled children!
Then, as we are often invited to do, we wondered about our never fully named practice of unschooling and about our own journeys from university lecturers to disillusioned professors dispensing grades to the students we loved.
We remembered the first sky-petaled days of our romantic relationship in Nigeria and the ensuing months leading up to our wedding when we decided that our Indian-Nigerian kids-to-come would be spared the shadows of schooling.
We reminisced about the first time we held our six-year-old never-schooled daughter Alethea-in a small clinic in Chennai, a few minutes after 6:33 p.m., when she was born-and how we came to know with our bones, as her tiny pink grip folded around my index finger, and as her clear eyes sparkled with the power of a warrior princess, that we simply couldn t send her away to the quiet captivity of a desk and predetermined answers.
We discussed Alethea s paintings and poems and our two-year-old son Kyah s transgressive development. We recalled instances when we felt like we were swimming against the tide, when our parents chastised us for denying our children the comprehensive education we had received, and when it felt easier to outsource our children to an anonymous system so troublingly connected to the militaristic motivations of nation-states.
Lingering at the threshold of a send button, a panoramic vision of our journey flashed before our eyes reinforcing the familiar convictions, old friends we knew; our unschooling journey was a decolonial path of fugitivity. A matter of more than racial justice. A matter of ecological transformation. A yearning beyond the wet dreams of progress and development. A cartographical pilgrimage into the cracks opening in a civilizati