Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work

Akilah S. Richards

Nov 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Akilah S. Richards

About this audiobook

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children. In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear, and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

About the author

Akilah S. Richards is a public speaker and the founder of Raising Free People Network, a social enterprise focused on resolving the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families' and organizations' capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.

Bayo Akomolafe is executive director and chief curator for the Emergence Network and is the author of We Will Tell Our Own Story and These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home.