By The Green Parent
10th October 2022
Akilah is the founder of the Raising Free People Network, a group that helps families, organisations and corporations solve big issues in education, leadership and personal development.
I’m Jamaican. My parents moved to the US when my brother and I were small and we went to school and college here. I first met my partner, Kris, in high school, and after college, we dated and married. Our children, Marley and Sage are 17 and 15. They started out in conventional public elementary school. After a short while, Marley began to express her frustration with not having time to think her thoughts. She excelled, but two years in, she was continually frustrated. She would say they were ‘peopling’, as in doing and saying things she wasn’t giving them consent to do. Eventually, Kris and I withdrew the kids from school with the proviso that if it didn’t work we would put them back.
Let me tell you, we certainly didn’t unschool from the beginning! We started out trying to do school at home. As you can imagine the girls resisted that. It was very messy, very bumpy, and we went back and forth. I recall moments of ‘Oh, my god, they’ve been on the screens too long. Let’s go back on to the curriculum.’ Steadily, we began to pay more and more attention and gradually recognised that they were learning all the time. We discovered this whole movement called unschooling. It was a stark realisation that much of all our lives had been centred around the girls’ school schedule. Suddenly we were no longer confined. We could do little big things! We travelled when flights and rentals were cheaper; during term time. We began spending half a year in Jamaica, half in the US.
There was this organic process of moving away from the school trajectory and into following their curiosity. We certainly didn’t have money; we couldn’t go backpacking for two years! But we stayed with cousins and immersed ourselves in Jamaican culture. We learned science through baking a cake or maths by converting rands to dollars and slowly, super-messily, we transitioned into unschooling.
Unschooling is about relationships, not about education. Sometimes it is a forceful thing, but it disrupts the standard operating procedure. For example, in conventional schooling, there is a standard by which every child should be learning things, and if they don’t learn in that way, they are behind. Those standards aren’t set by the teachers, nor even the head teacher. They’re not even set by someone at the county or state level; it’s much further up. So there’s a group of people who make a decision about another group of people without input or consent. And then those people are forced to follow that path. It’s a mirror of what it means to colonise, to take a sovereign space or group of people and make decisions about them without their consent.
We made the decision to be in a relationship with our children, and to say, ‘I want to know what you’re interested in, to develop a partnership not just with you, but with the environment we’re in. The things you’re interested in are available to you, through people, through places, through curricula, through community – if you consent to that.’
“Unschooling can look communal, which is a very Black thing, a very indigenous thing”
Removing the silo of the classroom meant we could move into a more communal way of being, of establishing relationships with people with different skill sets. It’s about decolonising, to bring back what is organic and what is consensual. What is inter-generational.
Unschooling is liberation work for Black people…. Here we are; what do we do in spite of the myth of white supremacy and the very real oppression and suppression and murder that comes from that? Also, for non-Black Indigenous people, the idea that we cannot always reclaim our land, but we can reclaim how we deal with our children, each other, how we value our indigenous education and our elders. How we value the way we talk over the way that we’re told to talk, how we value our hair. All these things are connected. Because when you have a child that isn’t being walked through standardisation and respectability politics – if you dress like this, you sound like this you get these grades – this is reclamation work. You’re saying ‘Who are you?’ and that you matters, whether whiteness accepts that or not.
Unschooling is not a thing of privilege. For many of us, we leave school to be safe. To break the school to prison pipeline, and the way that Black and Brown children are villainised, criminalised and sexualised. To leave that is not about privilege, that’s about safety. The other thing is that standard schooling is convention, unschooling is tradition. Unschooling might not look like a white, upper-middle class, picket fence thing. It can look communal, which is a very Black thing, a very indigenous thing. Take homeschooling co-ops, for example, where children are allowed to learn and explore under the guidance and the support of adults. Being there looks like being in a community, it looks like being in nature, it looks like engaging in apprenticeships.
The other thing is that we don’t need to dismantle before we enjoy liberation. Dismantling looks like a gazillion different steps by a lot of different means, right? So with that in mind, we don’t first wait for the ideal conditions. In order to get free, we start practicing freedom in little ways, by saying ‘How do I make my kid understand that race isn’t the problem, racism is, so where are the communities where they’re having these problems that I can step into?’ That’s an act of dismantling, because you’re moving beyond. So those are some of the ways we’ve got to shift our thinking to ‘What can we do, and what is being done?’ Because it is a massive thing, but these massive things are shifted by people. And we are people.
RESOURCES
READ Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work by Akilah S. Richards is published by PM Press
LISTEN Find Akilah’s podcast, Patreon, RFP school and more at raisingfreepeople.com
