Episode 159

Akilah Richards - DESCHOOLING Reclaiming agency over your time, body, thoughts, & actions

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February 17th, 2023

58 mins 50 secs

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unschooling unlearning socialization schoolish school in the pandemic relationships raisingfreepeople personal agency pandemic fareofthefreechildpodcast covid bipoc autonomy akilah richards academic learning

About this Episode

Join us for an episode of self-inquiry, unlearning, and reparenting. My guest Akilah Richards is back to dive more deeply into deschooling and what it’s all about and how we can recognize it as liberation work that fuels learning, life design, and relationships.

This episode was emotional for me because compulsory schooling harmed me in a variety of ways and I saw those same harms happen to my own children through the public school system. I’ve come to see that this system is harmful to just about anyone who experiences it because it’s very nature is to standardize, grade us, and get us to conform to ways of being which are dehumanizing.

De-schooling is also a massive part of the process of unbecoming- a subject I’m endlessly passionate about because it honors our humanity, and invites us into the messy and magnificent truth of being human.

It’s about reckoning with the systems that have dehumanized us, and unlearning the behavior that causes us to dehumanize others. It’s about breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma that conditions us to give another power and agency over our minds, bodies, thoughts and actions, and reclaiming our sovereignty so that we can make informed choices and participate through consent with the world around us vs. being forced to comply with tyranny.

While this episode is about de-schooling, it’s also about reframing our role in parenting and so much more.

I hope you love listening as much as I loved recording this interview.

Highlights:

  • How can we reframe our role as parents without the habits of control and power over our children?
  • Most of our lived experience in standardized education has been normalized, and yet it’s the cause of grave harm at many levels.
  • How can we experience awkwardness and disruption as gifts to deepen relationships and foster trust?
  • Why resistance is the roadmap and why we should trust it.
  • Why “mad question asking” is a necessary part of the deschooling process.
  • Why self-directed education offers our children more freedom to be who they are.
  • Why schoolish ideas persist in our culture and how we can change the status quo through the unschooling movement.
  • Why “learning loss” is schoolish and not a thing to be concerned about.
  • Why we need more than rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips
  • How to interrupt and disrupt the impact of colonization so that we can learn to trust ourselves and our children.
  • Why silence is such a great teacher and why we must practice sitting within the pauses as part of our deschooling journey.
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