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Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781629638614

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: PM Press

Publication Date: 11-01-2020

Pages: 176

Product Dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Akilah S. Richards is a public speaker and the founder of Raising Free People Network, a social enterprise focused on resolving the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organizations’ capacity to sustain cultures of belonging. Bayo Akomolafe is executive director and chief curator for the Emergence Network and is the author of We Will Tell Our Own Story and These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Beginning Our Process from Being Schoolish to Becoming Self-directed 7

Chapter 2 Using Mad Question-Askin' to Finally Start Changing Your Parenting Approach 15

Chapter 3 How Freedom from Schooling Made Room for Affordable, Extensive Travel (and Brand-New Parenting Fears) 31

Chapter 4 The Shift in Power That Eventually Rooted Us in Unschooling 43

Three Mistakes Parents Make When Teaching Consent and Bodily Autonomy-and How to Fix Them 51

Chapter 5 Birth of a Postcolonial Perspective on Parenting 59

Chapter 6 Recognizing Unschooling as a Communal Model for Collective, Long-Term Liberation 71

Fare of the Free Child, Episode o 80

Chapter 7 Leadership; The One-Word Bridge between Learning and Liberation 83

Chapter 8 Living Examples of How Deschooling Helps Us Cocreate the Cultures We Need 97

Chapter 9 A History of Trust Issues and Ways to Leverage Language 113

Chapter 10 Patois-Inspired Solutions to Your Fiercest Parenting Critic Problems 119

Chapter 11 Being Willing to Be Called In, and Out, by Children 133

About the Authors 143