Critical Unschooling: Critiques and Futures

• In Event: Perspectives on Teachers, Students, and Schooling Processes

Abstract

This paper analyses how black, indigenous, and person-of-color (BIPOC) communities have transformed alternative education through the practice of critical unschooling, or decolonising approaches to self-directed education (SDE). The possibility of unschooling as a decolonising pedagogy, however, has been overlooked in educational discourses in which unschooling is perceived as a middle-class luxury. By specifically analysing the philosophical underpinnings of critical unschooling’s opposition toward compulsory education, this paper unsettles dominant conceptions of SDE and of education itself.

Author

• Noah Romero, University of Auckland