raising free people

from Akilah Richards’ Raising Free People Practice Deck

This spring I’ve fallen down a most liberating, mind and heart-opening rabbit hole…the world of deschooling/unschooling. More specifically, I’ve been exploring the work of a community of unschoolers committed to decolonizing parenting and collective liberation.

Let me start with some definitions.

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Unschooling: a form of homeschooling not tied to the cultural framework, institution, and practices of compulsory schooling.

Unschooling families generally don’t follow a set curriculum, study “subjects,” segregate children into grades, or in general do anything that tries to recreate the structure or culture of school at home. Rather, learning is practiced as a free and autonomous process, with integrated support of community when a need is identified and desired. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms vary by family and there are really no set rules other than the learning is directed by the child and their own interests.

Some helpful resources and background reading can be found here and here. Unschooling is also sometimes called agile learning (inspired by the Agile process found in programming) or self-directed education, as it is a process led by the child’s own organically arising interest.

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Deschooling: often used specifically to denote a period of transition from conventional, compulsory school towards unschooling. I write towards because my understanding and experience of this so far is that it’s an on-going process, not a final destination.

For many families, this transition can be tricky and hard to navigate. In most cases, it’s not reasonable to expect that you can just flip the switch from living in a culture in which you are being instructed all day long, being told what to do, directed when and where to sit, what to read and write and learn, to suddenly being able to follow your own interests and direct your own learning. That’s not a shift that just magically happens overnight. There’s a lot of unlearning, exploration, recalibration of expectations, and building of trust (both self-trust and trust between parent and child) that has to develop, all of which builds the foundation on which unschooling can then flourish.

Deschooling is a process of decentering a culture of segregation by age, hierarchical power structures in learning, compulsory curriculum, arbitrary performance evaluation (aka grades). Deschooling embraces a more expansive view of learning as a process that is biopsychologically innate, lifelong, and free from the limitations of specific time (9am to 3pm), place (the classroom), and hierarchical relationships or roles (teacher/student).

This period of deschooling can last weeks, months, or even years. During this time there’s no set agenda other than pause and reorientation after being in an institution that at its core does not trust in children’s autonomy. Sometimes this might look like playing video games all day, or skateboarding, or doing Legos…or just “nothing.” Gradually, as kids decompress from the confines of the externalized structure of a schedule and rules they had no part in shaping, they reconnect with their own curiosity and interests, and unschooling begins in earnest. They begin to trust that they can shape their own experiences and relationship with the world. And the adults/parents begin to trust that learning is an innate process that doesn’t need to be micromanaged.

Deschooling can also be used more broadly to describe the journey of moving away from what Akilah Richards calls schoolishness towards a more liberated perspective of learning, relationship, parenting, and community. For more on this concept, take a listen to this Fare of the Free Child podcast episode, Busting the Deschooling Myth, with Akilah Richards.

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For our family, this deschooling process looks a little different, as he’s never actually been in a conventional school setting. Neil is now six and a half. He’s just finished a year of outdoor school in Tacoma before we moved back home to Portland. Technically, it would have been his kindergarten year, but he was doing “first-grade” level work in reading/writing and math. But that wasn’t really the important stuff he was learning. Mostly, he was learning how to be in community with people and place.

Before COVID, he had finished two years of Montessori preschool. As a former Montessori elementary teacher, I was pretty committed to his early education being rooted in Montessori…but also had been open-minded about whether we’d continue with Montessori elementary or not. Private Montessori programs are expensive and usually not particularly racially or economically diverse. There are few public Montessori programs in the Portland area and most are still bound by the rules and regulations of public school, including testing. Beyond that, they’re still bound by the culture of school itself, however much they try not to be. Like many parents, I grappled, and will continue to grapple with the intersections of our privilege in being able to choose what we want Neil’s education to look like.

What helped me gain clarity was stumbling across Akilah Richards’ book Raising Free People. I had read some of the unschooling literature, but something about it didn’t resonate. It was largely a conversation dominated by white, middle and upper-class women/mothers or academics— people with the privilege to be able to stay at home to direct their children’s education.

While I agreed with many of what are considered principles of unschooling, I didn’t feel like it was a community that reflected my family’s core values around social justice, decolonization of parenting and education, or collective liberation. That is—I wanted to find a community of folks who not only critically examining what learnring looks like for their own individual children and family, but who were reimagining the expression of unschooling beyond white, middle-class homeschooling.

I also didn’t particularly appreciate the dogma of some of the unschooling literature—its analysis of the pitfalls of compulsory education completely ignores the realities of most working-class families of color in the U.S. School is a necessity for many families because it is the only form of childcare available to the vast majority of parents. As long as we live in a capitalist society without universal health care, paid family leave, and education, a society that requires us to earn wages to pay rent or mortgages and bills, parents will need to work. Which means kids will go to school.

I love the way Richards describes unschooling—it’s so much more than just a rejection of compulsory education in its current expression:

“Unschooling is a way of life that is based on freedom, respect, and autonomy. Listening and witnessing help parents to facilitate learning by offering resources for their child to pursue their interests and to follow their curiosity, without the restrictions of time limitations or judgment by way of testing.”

— Akilah S. Richards

In her book Raising Free People, she describes unschooling as a process of “…shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people’s agency over your time, body, thoughts or actions [and] designing and practicing beliefs that align with your desire to thrive, be happy and succeed…”

This is a much more expansive, yet specific articulation of the kind of learning experience I dream of for Neil, and frankly, for us as his parents as well. As I continue to explore and collaborate with Neil to create his educational experiences (and yes, he definitely has ideas of his own, even at six years old), I turn to Richards’ beautiful practice deck, also called Raising Free People.

There are 15 focus cards, each with a single word on them and probing questions on the back, things like autonomy, boundaries, rhythm, ritual, pleasure. There are also four “D” cards, each with its own theme of exploration: daily practice, doorway, definition, and design. I think of these as building block cards, or elements of exploration for those on a journey of raising free people. So, I could choose to work with the daily practice card, then draw one of the 15 focus cards to hone in on a particular aspect of daily practice: what is my daily practice of relating to autonomy (mine, or Neil’s), or rhythm, or ritual, or boundaries?

The questions are so deceptively simple, yet when asked in the context of each of the different D cards, can take on a whole new layer of meaning. I’ve found this whole deck to be a really grounding tool for me as I flounder around a bit, groping for a bit of familiar structure in crafting a learning environment for Neil. Even though I’m a trained educator in an “alternative” method of education, I still have so much deschooling of my own to do.

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More to come…I will be reading, writing, exploring, experimenting, collaborating, and co-designing with Neil as we continue on our journey. In the meantime, here’s another episode of Fare of the Free Child that dives into some of the unschooling language, practices, and themes we’re working with these days.

Summer Dog Days

moving, part two