Decolonial Education & Inquiry
Decolonial education asks more than how schooling might be improved. It asks what we have been taught to value: whose knowledge carries authority, how obedience became confused with learning, why the body is so often left outside the classroom and what ideas about progress, success and intelligence we may need to unlearn.
This page gathers books, essays, films, podcasts and living educational experiments—from unschooling and self-directed learning to project-based, embodied and ancestral approaches. Together, they offer no single alternative system, but invite us to explore what learning might become when freedom is held alongside responsibility, relationship and care.
What might we need to unlearn—and embody—to become freer and more connected?
The Questions We Carry
Some questions do not resolve themselves after one book, conversation or experience. They travel with us, gathering other voices and becoming more textured along the way. Here, I bring a continuing educational question into conversation with the thinkers, practices and lived experiences that help me see it differently.
The question: How can adults take responsibility for the world children enter without taking ownership of their learning?
An entry point: The Crisis in Education from Between Past and Future — Hannah Arendt (see example resources below)
Arendt describes education as a meeting place between children who are new to the world and adults who carry responsibility for the world into which they arrive. She helps me distinguish authority from control: adults cannot simply withdraw, but neither should their responsibility require children to become passive recipients.
Placed in conversation with: self-directed education and Akilah Richards’ Raising Free People, which ask what becomes possible when children are trusted as active participants in their own learning.
The tension between them feels important. If adults surrender all responsibility, who introduces the child to a shared and complicated world? If adults determine too much, where can the child’s curiosity, refusal and self-knowledge live?
What forms of adult presence allow children to encounter the world without being required to surrender themselves to it?
Questions like these rarely belong to one person or one institution. If they are alive within your school, organisation or community, I offer consultation, facilitated inquiry and moderation to help bring the different experiences, assumptions and possibilities into conversation.
Ways Into the Inquiry
These pathways are not separate schools of thought. They overlap, trouble and enrich one another. Together, they help me explore what education asks us to unlearn—and what might need to be restored, practised or embodied in its place.
Unlearning School
This pathway examines the systems and assumptions that have made standardisation, testing, age-based progression and obedience appear inseparable from education.
Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds provides one entry point, questioning educational cultures that narrow intelligence and leave creativity at the margins. Other resources will consider how industrial, colonial and economic priorities continue to shape what schools measure and reward.Learning Through the Body
This pathway restores the body to the learning process.
Chantal Blake’s work through Honoured Womb brings womb and cycle literacy, rest, emotion, traditional care and bodily awareness into conversations from which they have often been absent. It opens a wider inquiry into what changes when breath, movement, tension, digestion, sensory experience and cyclical rhythms are understood as forms of information rather than interruptions to learning.Unlearning Through Freedom
What changes when children are recognised as active participants in their own learning?
Sari González and Becka Koritz’s Radical Learning, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education and Akilah Richards’ Raising Free People approach this question through unschooling, deschooling, autonomy and partnership. Their work also turns the inquiry towards adults: the fears, expectations and habits of control we may need to examine before freedom can become more than an educational ideal.Learning With the World
Learning takes place within relationships—with other people, with history, with land, with inherited knowledge and with a world that is living and unfinished.
Here, project-based, community-based, land-connected and ancestral approaches meet Hannah Arendt’s reflections on education and responsibility and Bayo Akomolafe’s explorations of fugitive study and postactivism. Their ideas do not sit comfortably together, and that is part of their value. They ask whether education prepares people to reproduce the world, repair it, participate in it—or become available to possibilities that its dominant institutions cannot yet recognise.Hannah Arendt — The Crisis in Education
What it unsettles: The assumption that children’s freedom requires adults to withdraw their authority or leave children to make sense of the world alone. Arendt distinguishes authority from force and places responsibility for the shared world firmly with adults.
What it makes possible: A way of thinking about adult presence that is neither domination nor abandonment. Education becomes an encounter between a world already underway and children who carry the possibility of beginning something new.
A question to carry: How can adults take responsibility for the world children inherit without requiring them simply to reproduce it?
Example Resources
Akilah S. Richards — Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work
What it unsettles: The belief that adult control is a necessary expression of care—or that children must endure coercion now to earn freedom later. Richards also turns deschooling towards adults, asking how “schoolish” habits, adultism and inherited fears continue within family relationships.
What it makes possible: Unschooling becomes more than an educational arrangement. It becomes personal, intergenerational and social liberation work: cultivating trust, honest communication and children’s confidence in their own capacity to learn.
A question to carry: What must adults unlearn about control before children can experience freedom as a present relationship rather than a future reward?
Ken Robinson — Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative
What it unsettles: Narrow definitions of intelligence and educational systems that treat standardisation as fairness while interpreting human difference as deviation. Robinson questions why creativity is separated from “serious” learning and why only certain abilities become visible through testing.
What it makes possible: Education can be understood as a living ecology rather than an industrial process. Creativity becomes a human capacity that can be cultivated across subjects, ages and forms of intelligence—not a specialist talent belonging to a fortunate few.
A question to carry: What forms of intelligence remain unseen when education recognises only what it can standardise and measure??
bell hooks — Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
What it unsettles: The idea that education is neutral—or that liberatory content alone can transform a classroom while its hierarchies, silences and disembodied habits remain unchanged. hooks asks teachers to examine how authority is carried, whose experience is recognised and who is expected to remain quiet.
What it makes possible: An engaged pedagogy in which critical thought, lived experience and the whole person enter the learning space. Freedom is not simply discussed as an idea; it is practised through participation, presence, accountability and the willingness to be changed by the encounter.
A question to carry: What becomes possible when education invites teachers and learners to be present as whole people rather than only as authorities and compliant minds?
Bettina L. Love — We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
What it unsettles: The belief that helping Black children become resilient within an inequitable educational system is the same as creating justice. Love describes an “educational survival complex” in which test preparation, discipline, grit and limited reforms may help children endure schooling without transforming the conditions that diminish them.
What it makes possible: Abolitionist teaching moves the conversation from survival towards freedom, joy, collective care and what Love calls freedom dreaming. Education becomes part of a wider struggle to create conditions in which Black children can learn, imagine and participate fully—not merely become skilled at withstanding harm.
A question to carry: What would education need to relinquish—and create—if Black children were expected not merely to survive school, but to live, imagine and flourish within it?
Alana Lentin - Racism: A Beginner’s Guide
What it unsettles: The idea that racism is chiefly a matter of personal prejudice, ignorance or intolerance. Lentin traces how ideas about race have been produced politically and reshaped through changing languages of culture, identity and belonging.
What it makes possible: A clearer connection between everyday racial assumptions and the histories, institutions and political choices that sustain them—even when a society describes itself as tolerant or “post-racial.”
A question to carry: What becomes harder to recognise when racism changes its language but not its effects?
Debby Irving - Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race
What it unsettles: The belief that whiteness is culturally neutral—or that good intentions place someone outside the story of racism. Irving examines how family, education, neighbourhood and social class shaped what she learned to notice, misunderstand or leave unquestioned.
What it makes possible: A personal entry into examining whiteness without making racialised people responsible for initiating every conversation. The book invites readers to connect inherited assumptions with the choices available to them now.
A question to carry: What have I been taught not to notice—and what responsibility begins once I can see it?
Bringing the Inquiry Into Practice
These questions may begin with books, films and conversations, but they become most meaningful when they meet the realities of a classroom, family, organisation or community.
If you are exploring what your learning environment makes possible—and what may need to be unlearned, restored or practised differently—I offer cultural wellbeing consultation, facilitated reflection and thoughtfully moderated conversations shaped around your particular context.