127: Doing Self-Directed Education

When parents first hear about interest-led learning (also known as self-directed education), they may wonder: why on earth would we do that?  And how would my child learn without anyone teaching them? Many parents start down this path with only an inkling of where it may end up taking them and I think this is true of our guest, Akilah Richards.  Akilah grew up in a typical Jamaican family where children were not allowed to have an opinion about anything - even their own bodies and feelings.  In her book Raising Free People, she writes that: "Respect, the way [Jamaican parents] define it, is non-negotiable, and the spectrum of things a child can do to disrespect an adult, especially a parent, is miles wide and deep.  Reverence for adults, not just respect, is expected, normalized, and deeply ingrained.  Somebody else's mama could slap you for not showing reverence to any adult.  Physical punishment for the wrong displays of emotion, even silent ones like frowns or subtle ones like deep sighs, were commonplace, expected, celebrated as one of the reasons children "turned out right."  Not only did you, as a child, dismiss any attitudes or anything adults might perceive as rudeness, your general countenance should reflect a constant respect - no space at all for showing actual emotion, if that emotion was contrary to what was reverent and pleasant for the adults in your life - again, especially your parents." While we may not have grown up with parents who were as overtly strict as this, chances are our parents and teachers used more subtle ways of keeping us in line with behavior management charts, grades (and praise for grades) and the withdrawal of approval if we were to express 'negative' emotions like frustration or anger. And of course this is linked to learning because compulsory schooling does not allow space for our children to be respected as individuals.  There may be dedicated, talented teachers within that system that respect our children and who are doing the very best they can to provide support, but they too are working within a system that does not respect them. So how could we use interest-led learning/self-directed education to support our child's intrinsic love of learning - as well as our relationship with them?  This is the central idea that we discuss in this episode.  It's a deep, enriching conversation that cuts to the heart of the relationship we want to have with our children, and I hope you enjoy it.   Get started with interest-led learning! If you'd like to learn more about the Learning membership which can help start you along the interest-led learning/self-directed education path, you can find more information here. Just click the banner.         Resources discussed during the conversation: Maleka Diggs' Eclectic Learning Network Developing a Disruptor's Ear, by Akilah Richards and Maleka Diggs Toward Radical Social Change (TRUE) community Akilah's website, Raising Free People Akilah's book, Raising Free People   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at your parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide to seven parenting myths that we can safely leave behind seven fewer things to worry about. Subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the your parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen  00:59 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. A long time on the show, we were lucky enough to hear from Dr. Peter Grey on the topic of self-directed learning and how learning can possibly happen when nobody is teaching the child what to learn. That conversation was quite a popular one, and today we're going to do a long delayed follow up on this topic with Akilah Richards. Akilah is a writer, and unschooling organizer, and host of the Raising Free People podcast. She's a founding board member of the Alliance for self-directed education and the author of the new book, raising free people, unschooling as liberation and healing work. Her focus is on helping Black indigenous people of color communities, use unschooling as a tool for decolonizing learning and for liberating themselves from oppressive exclusive systems. So we'll have lots here for those members of the audience today, as well as what White folks can do to support this process and use self directed learning in a way that helps to break down tools of oppression rather than perpetuating them. During the episode, I mentioned this supporting your child's learning membership, which is currently accepting members for just a few more days until the end of December 2020. Will get you and your child started on the path of self-directed learning that we discussed in this episode. As you'll hear, so much of this work is our own work to do, rather than just making sure our child is doing the right things at the right times to make sure they're successful. So you'll get help in understanding how learning actually happens in a child's brain so that you can recognise it and gain confidence in their abilities and in your abilities to help them learn. You'll learn how to document their learning in a way that doesn't require testing and grades, but instead recognizes the learning in all of its complexity. You'll be able to scaffold their learning so you can sensitively provide just the right amount of support to help them overcome a challenge without taking over the project yourself. And you'll get guidance on supporting the development of skills like critical thinking and non-cognitive learning. Which is learning that happens in our bodies and not just in our brains. Underpinning all that is a deep respect for children's own ideas and opinions, and we listen closely to those to help us understand how to support our child's learning rather than assuming that we know what they need and then teaching it to them. So if this sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to spend time doing with your child. I encourage you to check out the membership at yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership. It's suitable for parents with children old enough to ask questions through the end of elementary school, whether you're homeschooling, thinking about homeschooling, zoom schooling, or in school full time and looking to supplement that outside of school hours. Once again, you can find more information at yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership. Now let's get going with our conversation. Welcome. Akilah. Akilah Richards  03:37 Thank you, Jen. I so appreciate the invitation. Jen  03:40 And so I wonder if we can start with public schools. Which I know you have some experience with and maybe you can start by telling us what you see as being, I hesitate to use the word wrong but I can't think of a better one. But, what's wrong with public schools? Why did you opt out of this system? And are there some aspects of it that you actually think work quite well? Akilah Richards  04:02 Yeah, So I feel like for the work that I do, I feel like it's less important my opinion about public school. I think, Jen, that you and I probably have a similar experience. That many people have lots of opinions about public school and they're often not so great, even with the elements of it that we love, like teachers. I think that's an element that most people love. Yeah, that's certainly been my experience like falling in love with teachers who are also trapped inside of that same system and the constructs and confines that come when we focus on results and standardization instead of personhood and ways to humanize practices. That's pretty much my spiel about public school. It doesn't feel useful to go on about the issues with it, and I also, in terms of my own story, essentially, my daughters, they were only in elementary school when we left. I began to see how much of their personhood was being compromised at the expense of student hood and I got to see that because Miley and Sage they expressed it they talked about not having time as I talked about in the book. Miley kept saying she didn't have time to think her thoughts, you know, instead they kept peopling on her because that's how it felt to be in a space where you have to like move your body a certain way, put your finger over your mouth to display quiet and to walk in the line and the these things that might seem simple and normal and maybe even good were much like lots of other things that seems simple and normal and good. Violence, acts of violence against their bodies, against their personhood,  and against their practice of consent. So essentially, that was the issue with my kids, and that's also my issue with schooling generally. Jen  05:53 Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of parents might feel that maybe sense it and just not have the language to verbalize why they're uncomfortable with this environment that they went through. You know, I went to public school as well, and to see these incongruencies between the way that we want to raise our children and the practices that happened in school and to just not know how to reconcile that tension.  Akilah Richards  06:18 Exactly. Or even know what to do with what you know, because, for example, among Black communities in varying countries, not just the U.S thing. We know that schooling was not designed with us in mind, right? Like, it can be a form of subjugation across the board, but particularly when you talk about non-White bodies and specifically, when you talk about Black-bodies and non-Black indigenous bodies, that information is so harmful. The things that are missing on purpose repeatedly years upon years, the same stuff my mother said should have been in school when she was in school, were the same issues that I had with stuff, the same issues that you know, going on generation beyond generation. So there's also that element of people, cultures, peoples who can see what school can be but are also trapped inside what school never was and they never gonna be for some people. So that's another element of it that makes it deeply unattractive and problematic for me. Jen  07:24 Yeah, And so I don't want to spend much more time on schools, but I do want to address one question. I get a lot. I get a lot of pushback for being anti-school and I tried to respond that I'm not anti school. But the peer reviewed research that I looked at says that school is just not designed to teach children in a way that supports their learning and development. That. That from the peer-reviewed side and then all of the experiential stuff as well, that you're talking about is there as well. And so the people who are asking me these questions, the parents are asking me this question, are often committed to public schools for some reason, that children are going to be attended, and they want to know how can we support parents and children who are in the school system, either by choice? Or frankly, some of them don't have a choice? Are there ways that we can support those families?Given what we know about the system? Jen  08:11 In my opinion, of course, first of all, yes, there are many ways that we can help, and it will probably be good to talk to people who are focused on that, because I am not. What I'm focused on is building systems and community, and language and practice. For those who have escaped and for those of us when we can, and also so that we can bring self-directed skills and focal points, things like agency and consent and partnership, so that we can sprinkle that into all the waters and all the places because though everybody can't leave school, self directed education, those skills apply all across the board, their life skills and so my thing is if we can get more exposure and practice around self directed skills, including people who are still opted into or trapped into school, then it's going to make our society, our relationships, our ways of being together, safer and healthier and hopefully, Jen for me, hopefully, we fade school out and what we do instead is a thing that includes a school but doesn't center it and the inclusion of school will be humanized. That's my hope. Yeah, Not reform, not what to do with the people. What none of that. Akilah Richards  09:32 Mm hmm. Yep, I love that vision and you mentioned already about your daughter Miley and that she didn't have time to think her own thoughts and I was so struck with that because I read that in the book. And that was a conversation you'd had with her years ago, and then you released an interview with her. You interviewed her on the podcast not so long ago, and I listened to that and I was so struck by her self-assuredness and her confidence, and the contrast between that and what you said about the fact that she was losing her confidence by being in school. She wasn't asking questions anymore. She was worried that she was asking the wrong questions or just being too tired to ask any questions at all. And so I'm wondering, what implications does this have? this idea that you don't have a chance to think your own thoughts, have for our children's not just learning? but they're being in the world? Akilah Richards  10:24  Yeah, Akilah Richards  10:24 I love that you brought that up. Yet, It was such a stuck point for me. Like I all the time I said, I don't remember a lot of things. Like just like, generally, my memory is just like, wow. But that was that one really stuck out. Because it what it reminds me of is when I watch movies, thankfully, I haven't experienced this in my real life, where somebody is in a coma, like a type of coma where they can hear you, they can see you, but they can't do the things that they would want to do, basic stuff, let alone. You know, like breakdancing, right. So like that, to me, is its own curriculum. It is its own course of study. The fact that it is normal for us to be in an environment where someone explicitly states what we should be doing, not only with our bodies and our time, but with our cognition. What we should be pondering,how we should showcase this pondering? Dude, that's wild. That's normal. To me, it is, listen, the fact that that is normal to me is something that we need to be with. And when Miley said that, it allowed me to reclaim a bit of myself that I could then tap into and free my children. Because for me, the implications of that is that we become really well versed at performing, thinking and performing presence, to the point that it becomes something that we cannot even distinguish for ourselves. The times that we do want to actually be present for something we feel bad or guilty or we can't reconcile that, we have to not do something else that needs to be done in order to address this thing. Because schoolishness says, if you do this from nine to 10, and 10, and 11, and then you take a break here, and then if you finish at three, if you do that, for four years. This is the end result. So then we now learn we become acclimated to that type of dehumanized process, we apply that we attempt repeatedly and fail to apply that to our actual selves, and we also hold other people responsible to that. So there's no like deep research team that need. We see this all the time, we see this in our relationships with each other. Those are the results. Those are the effects of the normalizing of that way of someone else having that level of agency over things. Including how you think, what you think, and what you do with what you think. Jen  13:02 Yeah, when you put it like that, it is absolutely wild and the fact that we can no longer distinguish between what we've been told to think and what we actually think. Jen  13:14 So much of adulthood is like unraveling that, like who am I, outside of the ideas of who I've needed to be, or someone else's ideas of who I should be, or who I am, or who I was, so much of our own. Necessary unraveling is that, and I feel like some of that is maybe unavoidable, right, because we're people raised by other people. So it's not like this whole thing is like, you know, messed up from the beginning. It's the elements of it where we do not have the space to think our own thoughts, that the things that feel like a luxury, we have to have the money to go on a retreat to be with our feelings and thoughts and think about what you know, like Satguru said in this moment, and how does that connect with my body. These things that feel so like, like they're for rich White women, essentially, these are life skills that everybody has, but that there are things in place in our society that puts something in front of that level of self inquiry and exploration, and organic to gathering that I think is very much embedded in school.  Jen  14:20 Yeah, I definitely have seen things that I've learned in the last 18 months. Thinking about body awareness, and awareness of how I process information. And oh my goodness, wait, it's like why is that not the curriculum of schools? Jen  14:36 Exactly, Jen. Like, why wouldn't we know these things? Like even our digestive system?  Jen  14:41 Yes.  Akilah Richards  14:42 Right. Like, we learn about it right quick and we take the test. Boom. I know it. You know, we might Jen  14:46...