The Revelation Project - Episodes Tagged with “Autonomy”

Episode 159: Akilah Richards - DESCHOOLING Reclaiming agency over your time, body, thoughts, & actions

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Links:

Episode 143: SUMMER SERIES: Akilah S. Richards - Raising Free People

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I loved my conversation with Akilah S. Richards and walked away with a much deeper understanding of the value of unschooling in America. Conventional schooling is deeply rooted in colonization, industrial progress, and control over our personal autonomy.

Akilah is passionate about mindful partnerships and parenting. Since 2016 she has hosted Fare of the Free Child, a lifestyle and parenting podcast about the connection between liberation, learning, and parenting, particularly among Black, Non-Black Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Parents, educators, unschoolers, and entrepreneurs tune in weekly to connect about unschooling, deschooling, conscious parenting, and self-directedness. Discussions center around emotional wellness, learning and children, parenting, self-care, and self-love. The voice and work of this Jamaican-born, digital nomad have been featured on NPR, Forbes, NBC TV, Good Morning America’s blog, and in several literary and in-person spaces throughout the U.S., Jamaica, and South Africa. The TEDx Speaker, digital content writer, and facilitator’s highly-anticipated book Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press), will be released in the Fall of 2020.

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Episode 34: Akilah S. Richards - Raising Free People

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

“We can’t keep using tools of oppression and raise free people.” -Akilah Richards

Unschooling is a life design choice but it’s also deeply linked to liberation and the idea of raising free people.
Akilah’s children, Marley and Sage, had a consistent level of pushback when attending conventional school and at one point, Akilah and her partner Chris started to listen to what their children were saying.
While the girls were accelerating academically, they were shrinking emotionally.
They had stopped asking questions, which is a very “schoolish” thing.
Akilah and Chris wanted their children to have agency and autonomy and the journey has revealed a tremendous tie into the work of liberation.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
This began a process of “mad question asking.”
The way of the world is schooling - is our job as parents to acclimate our children to that?
The idea of unschooling is to help your child create a trustful relationship to learning.
The American Dream seems deeply entrenched in this idea of conventional education as the only way.
Unschooling started as an experiment based on what Akilah and Chris knew was not working.
When they left conventional education they discovered that there were many rewards - many freedoms with travel and finances that they had not previously recognized or been able to take advantage of.
A lot of what we see as educational issues are really issues of human relationships.
Unschooling creates an environment to question and unlearn.
Questions are the path.
Mad question asking brings us inward into the feminine - how do you want to feel?
In our school system, children are rewarded when they comply.
Parents worry about socialization, but socialization happens everywhere but school.
All people are indoctrinated into the “system,” but when you walk around in a Black body there is another level of suppression of your personhood which is why creating safe environments for BIPOC children to learn and develop confident autonomy is so important.
Unschooling isn’t just for rich people.
The pandemic is offering us opportunities and parents are noticing a positive shift in their children.
Covid is an opportunity to create a new normal in many ways including our relationship to education.
Liberation comes with responsibility and accountability.
It is time to decolonize our ideas of learning

“The resistance is the roadmap, not a route to something else.”

Links: