Introduction

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Unschooling, deschooling, finding liberation through radical pedagogies, reimagining the ways in which we learn, teach and grow.

 

Child liberation is a prerequisite to abolition at large. 

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Child Woven proposes that the liberated world requires the end of the reproduction of capitalist modes of opperssion and dispossession through mass global education systems, dissolving agency and cultivating obedience in each new generation. Where classism, gatekeeping, abuse of power are introduced as necessary elements of discipline, it is the location of injustice established as inevitable. A system ensuring the separation from body's intelligence, from an embodied sense of safety, dignity and belonging.

 

Child Woven proposes that the mandatory education system cannot be reformed: it needs to be abolished; and for a liberated future, the way new generations learn, teach and grow needs to be reimagined on the ground of care. Care within the framework of disability justice: every body is whole and worthy, no body is left behind. The (changing) needs of our bodies as foundational in each level of the new worldbuilding.

 

It takes courage, learning, healing, rest, growth, community support, love, daydreaming, somatic work, therapy and more, to transform the deeply internalised oppression that was systemically instilled in our bodyminds throughout crucial years of our development spent in schools. So much grieving, because there is so much to grieve about how time, agency and sleep is stolen.

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There is an abundant lineage of thinkers, artists and educators who have been imagining new ways. We, the ones who felt the "no" in their bodies while trying to grow through that coercive system, and still holding our truth close to ourselves, are the ones who can build new systems of learning and imagining life upon that lineage .

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Child Woven follows in the footsteps of bell hooks, taking theory as a liberatory practice and letting it help with grief and release, while offering a ground of gathered information for imagining a future where education is a practice of freedom, a rehearsal for living.

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For inquiries about the text, please email rukelfilm@gmail.com

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Bibliography, Lineage, Riverbeds

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