 All right. I'm really excited to be here with Akilah Richards and we're going to talk about unschooling, liberation and other topics. First of all, Akilah, I just want to say hi. Thank you for joining me for this. Hi, you are so welcome. Thanks for the invitation, George. Yeah, I'm excited. So let me just kind of share your official bio with people and then we'll get into the conversation. So Akilah Richards is passionate about mindful partnerships and conscious parenting. She started a digital multimedia platform called Raising Free People Network and the intention is education, deep listening, and emergent collaborations within the intersections of privilege, parenting, and power. Her unschooling podcast, if we're going to talk about unschooling, is called Fair of the Free Child, Fair F-A-R-E, of the free child. And she has the latest book that she's written is Raising Free People, Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work. Awesome. Well, of course, I'm going to have the links below so you can check out all of her work. But so much I want to ask you. I think where I'd like to start is, yeah, what motivated, what inspired you to get into this? I imagine conscious parenting, you know, being becoming a parent makes you start to think about that. But what about unschooling, liberation? I mean, yeah, because the typical path is, well, just go to school. And I wish I had this message of unschooling when I was younger, but we'll start there. Yeah. And I hear that all the time and same with me where it's like, man, I wish I knew about that. I had that language. I wish my parents had that language. And really our daughters are why we have that language. So my partner, Chris and I, have two daughters who are now 17 and 15. And it was really because of their resistance, their pushback to conventional education that we began to even pause, let alone question something else. You know, we all had, Chris and I both had our own school wounds, as I talk about all the time in my work. And we knew all of those things, but we just kind of wrapped that up all in a like, well, you know, we're going to be really present, we're going to be on the PTA board, and we're going to be diligent. So those wounds are going to make them stronger. And we're going to minimize them. And, you know, all the things that most parents probably feel and with great teachers and a good school board, we can do it. But that doesn't happen. There's still all of these isms that are perpetuated or ignored, all these natural ways of learning and being, the diversity of how we learn, you know, how we learn to center reward and punishment and standardization. And we fear diversity and we fear collaboration because that's cheating. We started to recognize how normalized those things were in schooling. After Marley and Sage kept pushing back and saying, Marley's thing was I talk about it in my book where she said, I just don't have time to think my thoughts. You know, and she was in kindergarten, I'm like, just think them when you get home, you know, like, that's amazing. Right. Because now that's, that's a part of my own ethos about any relationship that I'm in, like, do they feel like they have time to think their own thoughts with me, like, how much of this thing that I just know I'm doing is actually in opposition to what the other person might need. And we're grateful that our daughters were vocal about it. And it took two years. So by the time it was just Marley. And then by the time they were done, both Marley and Sage were both in there saying, Marley was saying she didn't have time to do what she wanted to do because she liked to watch fetch with rough, rough men. It was a particular cartoon. And it had science in it and math and she just wanted, and, and then Sage would say that she had this term where she said they keep peopling on me. And I don't like it. And I and it was so effective for me when she used that term, because it was like people were deciding things for they were like, Oh, are you Marley sister, you look like my oh, you're a door and she just was like, I just wanted to read my book and play on the thing. And, and I was like, man, what must that feel like to have that feeling every day. And then the people that's that you trust the most your parents, you're telling them. And they're like, they're there, hun. So eventually we just were like, Okay, we are not sure what to do. But maybe we can start by just not doing the thing that they're saying is a problem. And so we withdrew them from school and just started doing the same thing at home until that also became a problem. And it just led us to the thing that we learned was called unschooling. So the difference between unschooling and homeschooling, maybe you can kind of give us a quick, yeah, distinction there. And I love doing that. Yeah, because it's so, so matter. So homeschooling is a school at home. So it follows the same principle that usually there's this K through 12 in the US kindergarten through 12 curriculum. And, you know, you get the right curriculum that might be a little more gardening based or a little more fairies based or pumpkins, but it's still going to hit the same metrics. Whereas unschooling is you are gathering what curriculum might be first, you would never predetermine a curriculum, because it would be rooted in your children. So if you have a son that's really into horses, then you wouldn't find a curriculum that centered horses, you would look at the different ways that he could engage with horses and and and pay attention to how different parts of his personality and his interest show up in that. And then you do we do this thing called strewing S T R E W I N G, where we interest are an opportunity to introduce things that they might not be interested in, but are connected to it. So with horses, if they're, if they love maybe to look at how high horses jump, then, you know, you're bringing in other skills in there that they know. So unschooling is more of like, let's get into a rhythm together where naturally, whatever you're naturally inclined to, because everything is everything, you're going to be connected to other things, and you're going to need a tutor because it's at some point it's going to stop. So you will invite that and we can. So that's the difference. One is much more based on the individual and their environment, and the other one is based on ideas of what needs to be learned by when. Right. Yeah. And it's kind of the way you're describing it is it's kind of like the how the brain works. You know, it's like neurons connecting to other neurons, or a mind map. It's like ideas connecting to other ideas. And it's like that quote, I don't remember who said it's like you you unravel one thing, and then it's connected to everything. Exactly. Right. So that's amazing. That's really, that's really, that's really great to start with their like one core interest and kind of branch out from there. So I'm curious then now that, you know, your kids are getting to the point where, you know, college is the traditional question. I'm just wondering, I don't know how we want to talk about this, but how does unschooling relate to career? I guess is really what I'm asking, because like I remember when I was growing up and going through the traditional schooling, I was often asking, like, how is this going to help me in my, I mean, I was actually asking, how was it going to help me my everyday life now? Like, okay, if I'm learning this event like trigonometry, like, where, when am I going to ever use this? And, you know, and, you know, people go, well, you might, you know, go into science or whatever, you might use that, but it's like, I didn't even like science. But anyway, that's a separate, but it's like, it's like, you know, I think, I think the question, maybe what unschooling seems to solve is like, I'm interested in this now. Cool. Exactly. Right. But what about parents or just those of us who are like, well, what about the kids future? How is that? Like, there's apprenticeship and like, like kind of vocation-based education is very much about, all right, you're going to become, you know, a plumber or going to become an accountant or whatever. Right. So, yeah. So how does unschooling connect to all that? It completely, again, because there's sort of this premise that I'm sure it's set in lots of places, but Jamaica and I would say everything is everything, you know, everything is everything. There is a no one thing, you know, if it was even like rocks, like I collect rocks, there's so many things that come from the history of the rock, where I go to get it, the structure of the rock, you know, I can go, I can nerd out as far as I want to on this thing. And it's going to connect me to other things. And I'm going to meet, you know, a professor of geology who's also into the same type of dolphins that I like. And then we're going to have this conversation. And there's no interest. There's no interest that doesn't have, or there are few interests, I should say, that doesn't have a path that's tied to it, that you can define or ones that you can put together. And so, for example, there are a lot of universities now, and it started with some of the Ivy League ones that are finding that they're actively seeking out not only homeschoolers, but radical homeschoolers because those children tend to have more of the type of critical thinking skills that conventionally school people come out and they're like, oh, if I hit a problem in my company, if there's no textbook thing for this, whereas somebody who was able to explore their environment and see the ways that things connect, they may not have a solution, but they have a level of confidence and experience in how everything is everything, that they are like more looking for the cues as opposed to focus on the fact that there isn't a solution. And that's really how it ties to college. So you, they're now accepting portfolios. And Antonio Bueller, who's an unschooling-minded person in our realm of self-directed education speaks to this in great detail about how unconventionally schooled or educated people go into college, what that process looks like, the advantages that are there in terms of a certain knowledge of self and a certain confidence in your savvy that you usually don't develop, it's usually tied to money after that's tied to like, I've achieved these things. So now my confidence is here, but why is it so easily shaken if I earned it this way? So these are the dynamics that make it, that link it to not just the application process of college, but the effectiveness of going into higher education through unschooling. It's amazing. It's so, so great. So much more curiosity is developed, right? And the way you were talking about curiosity, creativity, connectedness. Yes. And, and sort of like, yeah, community, right, right. Not just situationally, whoever you're around geographically, community. So, so when people ask you, do you recommend college nowadays? What would you, what would you say? I would say that I recommend consent-based education. So like, if the person to whom that college would apply, are they interested and why are they interested? Because that's way, that's where they think they're going to make themselves into something. I think that's problematic. But if they're going there to explore, to discover not to become, then, then maybe it's a path, but I don't think that it's a prescriptive thing. I don't see it as an inherent goal on the trajectory of learning at all. I think that's highly romanticized and super colonized. You know, like it's very much a space where the industry of education and the way that we're marketed to about the higher you go, the better you are is, is violent. Yeah. Wow. It's so interesting. I, I heard the stat. Tell me what you think about this, that the, the segment of at least the US population that's getting the most college degrees or professional, or if, you know, sort of traditional degrees is African-American women. Have you heard this? I haven't heard it, but it doesn't. I wouldn't be like, what? And also, also the highest degree in terms of, I think it was like, not just college, but master's degrees as well. Like, like black women are somehow the, the great of growth anyway in the segment. It's like, wow, it's like, what's going on there? I mean, I'm, I'm happy if they're getting more career success. That's good. Is that the only thing? Is that, is that, was that happening? Yeah. Are they going into leadership? Or is it a matter of the requirement? Right. Are they, do they feel they have to do that? Yeah. Or, or do they have to do that as a result of the idea of like, how do you prove your validity? Exactly. Right. Right. Yes. And this is, this, that is an unschooled approach to a statistic because what we're trained, the schoolish mind. So I talk a lot about schoolishness because it doesn't just live in school. The schoolish mind would say, wonderful, go black women, go. And it would end there. But the critical thinking mind would look at the history, you know, of black-bodied people in a space and say, Oh, what are the other dynamics there? Not necessarily to make an assertion, but to look at it with a lens that isn't just rooted in what data is supposed to do, which is to prove something and move on. And, and unschooling invites that as opposed to rewarding when somebody is like eloquent or whether they can recite the facts, you know, we reward those things. And we're saying, no, intelligence is so much more than what you can remember or even your idea of what eloquence is needs to be questioned. And we can do that. We can do that. And we need to. Yeah. It's so inspiring. And I'm thinking back to this point about college and career. I have, well, I have some family members who it's like, I was trying to talk them out of college. But anyway, it's still, it still happened. Because I think, I think I kind of wish I had another path, you know, because my parents spent so much money on college. I look back and go, yeah, I mean, there were some benefits. But, but if I had, well, a community or a mentor, I could have had a more creative upbringing development, you know, more entrepreneurial, for example, I mean, this is all very entrepreneurial. Right. And so now then I'm wondering, I'm wondering like how this starts to fit into society. I think, obviously, especially with the pandemic in the, in just, you know, societal changes in the past decade or so, the traditional path of college to corporation is starting to break down, the gig economy and all that stuff. But give us a sense, I'd love just stuff to hear. It's like, what is your vision or hope for where this could all go? Like, let's say, I don't know, 20 years from now, you know, the pandemic really shook a lot of traditional education. And it started to kind of come apart, right? But, you know, and I personally, I, yes, the pandemic brought us a lot of problems. But in terms of education, I feel like the shaking up of the, that the traditions was probably a good thing. It did bring a lot of stress to parents, of course, because, you know, they'll now have suddenly have to stress. And yeah, right. But what do you feel? I mean, as just seeing the trajectory of the gig economy, unschooling, homeschooling, etc. Like, what's, what's your kind of ideal way to see this go? Yeah. So George, I, I love what I love. I love a lot of things about what I get to do. But one of the things that I love is that I never feel that I have to convince anyone that unschooling isn't this bad anti-school, anti-teacher thing, even when people start out there. Because inherent in it is a lot of humanity, you know, like a lot of shared, but not necessarily understood meaning, you know, like we're, we're nodding at the same sort of things. It connects you to when you talk about it being entrepreneurial. I mean, so much, so many entrepreneurs become unschoolish because we recognize that connection. And there's, there's always a thread that is tied to something else whenever I'm talking to someone. And my, the thing that I want to be part of is for that to be normal. The, the fact that someone can say that, yeah, I dip in and out of school. There are no legal issues with my son or my daughter or my anything going to classes in January. And then again, in August, because that's when they felt that they wanted to have that particular type of structure or they really liked that teacher. And they learn in a certain way because that teacher brings out a certain thing. And they knew that because they had a friend who stayed in class in school and knew that teacher. And so that our intelligence becomes less and less dependent on what a politician says people need to learn and then becomes what teachers are beholden to. And then students are oppressed by and families are judging them based on, you know, my family is Jamaican and we moved here with no, no denying the idea of like the American dream is the goal. And it was my job to make sure that all that hard work, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when I got that and lived in the nice predominantly white neighborhoods, so my kids can go into the good school, because that's where the good schools were. It turns out that that was more of like plantation life than anything else I'd ever experienced. So what I, what I want to be part of is for us to look at and embrace the diversity and the need for consent within education and the need for community. So that schools are not silos where we're trying to like have more dollars to send somebody to the best one. But instead we're in a community where wherever a school is, the students in there know the actual store owner of the road because the relationship is not with the foundation that's putting the dollars in, but with the, the people that that's just as normal as somebody who is like going to the highest level in academia because they love it. That that is what I would want to really be part of and speak to and energize. Oh, I love that. Oh, so inspiring. It's interesting, you know, in college, I came across this author named Paulo Freire. And I got to have their press. Yes. Pedagogy of the press. And it was just so, I'm like, why isn't this more well known? I mean, it's the idea, if I've forgotten most of it, but the idea that I came away with is okay, what if education was like, like based on problems in the community that the students cared about, you know, and, and what you just said, the store owner of the street, you know, it's like, what if we could educate ourselves to build up our community instead of some strange curriculum that was handed down by some board somewhere that has nothing, not no connection to my life. And it's like, I was, I was reading a, an online forum. It was on Reddit. And it was, it was a part of the, the whole, you know, these days is a popular sort of personal finance movement, like fire, they call it financial independent retire early movement. And this guy was saying how he is a proud shirker at work. He's like, he's like, I'm just trying to do the minimum here, keep my job, do the minimum, save up money so I can retire early. And I understand, I mean, I have been in jobs where they've been really meaningless too. But I'm like that, and I start to see this thread of like, that is unfortunately decades for people, like they start off being shirkers at school, because it's not meaningful. Like I'm just, I'm just doing it. I'm just doing enough, make sure I don't get punished too much, you know, graduate, and then I go into a job, which the same thing, I just want to make sure I don't get punished too much, graduate. It's like, that's 40 years of your life or however many from school all the way to retirement, that's life. It's like, can we do something more meaningful here? Please. And you change it, you know, you change your, like the core of you in a sense, like the way that you were when you had that sort of energy and connection, when you had a moment to do that, of course, the older you get, the more responsibilities you have, so the less it consumes you and then you become another version of the very thing that was never connected to you in the first place. And this is why I believe so much in this movement towards self-directed education, because it is not anti-school, the movement is not anti-school, it's saying that we can't center that over the human. Like what if the person and the things they cared about were part of how their education was structured, which meant you got their consent, which means all of these issues that we're dealing with, with how we don't understand how to respect and value things that we don't connect with, those are our skills that unschooling helps to cultivate when you're doing it, not in a like rich closed off silo, but when you're doing it with, you know, this, I call it an ecology of accountability, where you're saying, I'm not the wokist and I'm not trying to say that I know all the things I'm saying that I want to know how to be in community and how to have learning that is consent based and curiosity driven and communal and also allows me to be whoever it is that I am. That is not some like weird nirvana that you can only get in the Himalayas. No, these are skills we can and do practice and that's what, that's how I understand unschooling. Wow, that's beautiful. So how does this, how do you express this work in terms of your offerings, your services programs? Tell us, give us a sense of that. Well, I take some of George Cow's classes for real. No, really, I was saying that before we started recording, it's such a wonderful addition to, you know, the things that I'm unlearning and the ways that I'm really getting like settling into myself and my groove. So what I've always done, I started out doing online courses because that's just my, that's how I process things. I'm a writer. I've written 10 books. This book is my 10th book. It's the first one that was published by not me, but I've written books before that and I almost all of my books have online courses. So like I was on Udemy, you know, and all of the things and I find that easy to do. So I've always done courses and I like video and I, it's, I'm comfortable on a camera. So that's always been what I do. So then later in 2016, I transitioned into podcasting. Really, it was not a business decision. I was really angry with some things that were happening and the feedback that I was getting from Black families in particular around fear of police and our capacity to raise free people. So I started my podcast, Fair of the Free Child, to talk about what would it mean to raise a free person in a world that tends to diminish, dehumanize and disappear them. And then I really found a groove in podcasting. So then I started, you know, sharing my courses on my podcast and when the pandemic happened, my podcast just got a lot, lot of attention. And then I happened to have had all these other things that I've created before that now get to live in a space with a lot more people than the 20 people who, who bought all my courses before. So I have rfpunschool.com, raising free people on school where- Yeah, and I'm going to show it on my screen, if that's okay. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this, thanks. This is so great. So this is where, so I talk about sustaining a culture of belonging because much of unschooling is about that, cultivating it for oneself and trying not to be a barrier to that in community, whoever you're in community with. So whether at home, outside of your home, you know, whatever your circles are. So I have these courses and I used to, before my book came out, I used to do webinars around these courses, you know, on occasion. Yeah. But Which ones should people start with? Or I guess depends on their interest, but maybe like give us two or three to start with. Yeah, easy. So I would say from schoolish to self-directed. It's the most recent one. It very much is a response to the pandemic. In terms of people who are saying, I'm not saying I'm ready to become an unschooler, but I am saying I'm recognizing a lot of what is happening in schooling doesn't work for my kid or my family. So what are some of the main mindset shifts that I need to be considering here? That's what that course is. It's super dope. I highly recommend it. Another one, how to focus on learning. This one is my friend, Dr. Sanjada and I, another just brilliant person in the unschooling space. This one is for community members who did not choose self-directed education for their child. So maybe like a grandparent, you know, or a co-parent who's like, I think we just need to push down on the school harder. But you're also trying to figure out how to support this kid. So tell me about this self-directed education thing. How does this work? What's the premise? This is about that. And I did it with Dr. Sanjada because he's a lot more like statistics and science than me. So it was a beautiful collaboration. So those are the two that I would recommend. Awesome. Well, the website is RF, stands for raising free people. RFP on school.com. The link will be below. But folks, if you're interested in this, go ahead and jump in and join the movement. Akeela, thank you so much for your work. Really appreciate it. It's amazing. You've put out so much out there, 10 books, got a podcast. That's all going to be linked below. Thank you. Any kind of final words of encouragement for those of us who are finding our way into this Yes. You're welcome. And thank you to George. As I said, I very much consider you a part of this movement to raise free people because I'm getting free of a whole lot of schoolish ideas of structure in part through your work. So thank you. So I would say the thing I would leave people with is to invite more questions, not solutions. We tend to be oriented towards finding the solution, either the right one or the good enough one. And one thing that's been very liberating for me is to not need definitive answers as much or even cloudy answers. But instead, what different questions could I be asking? To really invite questions into your life more is a practice that I recommend. I love that. That's a great way of finishing up here. Thank you, Akeela. Thank you for your work. You're welcome. Thank you to George. Peace.