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Medicine Stories

75. Learning Is Innate: Ancestral Childhood, Unschooling, and Healing - Akilah S. Richards

Medicine Stories

Amber M Hill

Herbs, Health & Fitness, Ancestry, Alternativemedicine, Herbalism, Alternative Health, Dreams, Healing, Society & Culture, Psychedelics

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If the phrase “school wounds” stirs something inside of you, or the words “crisis schooling” describe your current reality as a parent or caregiver, or you’ve just always intuited that there’s something not quite right about modern compulsory schooling, this episode is for you.

TOPICS:

  • The reimagining of schooling as we’ve known it
  • Akilah's story of schooling and unschooling
  • Unschooling is not just school at home- it’s a whole new paradigm of learning, power, and belonging
  • School wounds
  • The radical presence it takes to raise up kids in this way
  • How leaving school can free up a family’s life in myriad unanticipated ways
  • Schoolishness and the American Dream, in which so much of the actual human gets lost
  • The slow normalization of dehumanizing systems and institutions
  • Being constantly in curiosity about how our children (and ourselves!) actually learn
  • Reframing consent in the parent/child relationship
  • The liberation of being allowed bodily autonomy (especially for black folk)
  • Akilah’s response to the common assertions that only stay at home parents/rich people/white people can school at home
  • Actionizing love & recognizing that it’s all portal work

RESOURCES (if listening on an app that doesn’t support embedded links, find these at https://mythicmedicine.love/podcast)::

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I keep calling it portal work or soul work because it really has nothing to do with education

0:08.2

in the conventional sense and everything to do with learning and unlearning, unraveling,

0:15.4

remembering, connecting, questioning, you know, like the things that are inherent in all

0:23.4

of the ways we learn and engage naturally, like as part of nature that you don't have

0:28.6

to like simulate or call it mathematics, you know, like in order for it to exist, in

0:34.8

order for it to matter, in order for it to be relevant.

0:38.7

Hi friends and welcome to the Medicine Stories podcast where we are remembering what it is

0:47.5

to be human upon the earth.

0:49.3

I am your host Amber Magnolia Hill and this is episode 75 with Akila Richards.

0:56.5

If the phrase school wounds stirs something inside of you or the words crisis schooling,

1:02.6

describe your current reality as a parent or caregiver, or if you've just always

1:07.4

intuited that there's something not quite right about compulsory schooling, this episode

1:12.8

is for you.

1:13.8

So I've been aware of and really fascinated by unschooling and various forms of homeschooling

1:21.0

for about 15 years now, but it wasn't until COVID and really seen the discussions happening

1:29.5

online and mom groups that I got passionate about doing a podcast about this.

1:35.2

So what I keep seeing over and over again is moms really at a breaking point with trying

1:42.4

to navigate distance schooling with their kids.

1:46.7

And what I keep thinking when I'm seeing this is wow, they don't even know that they

1:51.4

don't have to do this.

1:53.2

It hasn't occurred to them that there's an alternative to this system that we've all

2:00.8

bought into.

...

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