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107: Child Liberation Theology w/ R.L. Stollar
22 Plays3 years ago
*This podcast contains content regarding suicide and child abuse.
In this podcast we are joined by R.L. Stollar, a Child Liberation Theologian and child and survivor advocate. Stollar is the author of the upcoming book, The Kingdom of Children, which reports on the issues and concerns of the evangelical homeschooling movement. Stollar, who was himself homeschooled, is an advocate of homeschooling who is calling attention to the issues that many face in the system, connecting the concept to faith — which is often juxtaposed with the practice of homeschooling. His work in Child Liberation Theology, which you’ll hear about shortly, centers the idea of young people being leaders in their faith-based decisions.
This is an interesting topic, because it blends ideas that aren’t commonplace in progressive education. Although I am personally not religious, there are fascinating connections between a faith-based education, self-directed learning, critical pedagogy, and more that we’ll explore in this podcast.
As a side note, this podcast also features Thomas White. Thomas is our prior development director who accepted a new position after this podcast aired. Essentially, Thomas did his job so well with us that he accepted a full-time position doing development work, leading to a conflict of interest with his current part-time role. We’re sorry to see him go! Thomas is writing a book on Classical Christian Education, which has a lot of overlap with the upcoming conversation.
We introduce R.L. Stollar as a Dr....but in fact he has not earned a doctorate (yet!)
GUESTS
R.L. Stollar, Child Liberation Theologian and child and survivor advocate and author of the upcoming book Kingdom of Children
Thomas White, former HRP development director and author of upcoming book on Classical Christian Education
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Human Restoration Project Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 107 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:08
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:12
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Skylar Prim, Mary Becker, and Matt Walker.
00:00:20
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:21
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Dr. Stoller on Evangelical Homeschooling Issues
00:00:43
Speaker
In this podcast, we are joined by Dr. R.L.
00:00:45
Speaker
Stoller, a child and survivor advocate.
00:00:48
Speaker
Dr. Stoller is the author of an upcoming book, The Kingdom of Children, which reports on the issues and concerns of the evangelical homeschooling movement.
00:00:56
Speaker
Dr. Stoller, who was himself homeschooled, is an advocate of homeschooling who is calling attention to the issues that many face in the system.
00:01:04
Speaker
connecting the concept of faith, which is often juxtaposed with the practice of homeschooling.
00:01:08
Speaker
His work in child liberation theology, which you'll hear about shortly, centers the ideas of young people being leaders in their faith-based decisions.
00:01:15
Speaker
This is an interesting topic because it blends together ideas that aren't commonplace in progressive ed.
Homeschooling Advocacy and Background
00:01:21
Speaker
Although I am not personally religious, there is a fascinating connection between faith-based education, self-directed learning, critical pedagogy, and more that we'll explore in this podcast.
00:01:31
Speaker
As a side note, this podcast also features Thomas White.
00:01:34
Speaker
Thomas is our prior development director who accepted a new position after this podcast aired.
00:01:38
Speaker
Essentially, Thomas did his job so well with us that he accepted a full-time position doing development work, leading to a conflict of interest with the role he had with us part-time.
00:01:46
Speaker
We're sorry to see him go, but Thomas is writing a book on classical Christian education, which has a lot of overlap with the upcoming conversation.
00:01:59
Speaker
I was homeschooled kindergarten through high school graduation.
00:02:02
Speaker
I personally had a generally positive experience, but I also saw a lot of abuse and neglect that my fellow peers experienced.
00:02:11
Speaker
So that is what made me interested in advocating for homeschool children.
00:02:17
Speaker
The longer version is that
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, being homeschooled in high school, I had the opportunity to travel around the country teaching speech and debate to other homeschool high schoolers.
00:02:31
Speaker
And that exposed me to all sorts of different subcultures and ideologies and practices within homeschooling.
00:02:38
Speaker
And so I saw
00:02:40
Speaker
pretty much everything and saw just how far down the rabbit hole goes really in terms of how extreme and authoritarian the homeschooling world can be.
Abuse and Protection in Homeschooling
00:02:52
Speaker
And at the time I
00:02:56
Speaker
was chalking it up to the high performance culture that debate kind of fosters a lot.
00:03:02
Speaker
There have been studies on that.
00:03:05
Speaker
But the more I heard from peers and the older I got, the more I saw these patterns were transcending just that specific practice.
00:03:17
Speaker
started to see that these things were happening all over, and then connecting with other peers when I was an adult and seeing the same patterns, that's what helped maybe found Homeschoolers Anonymous, which is a website that went viral, got millions of views, and it shared stories from hundreds of homeschoolers that experienced abuse and neglect.
00:03:42
Speaker
And that inspired me to want to go back to school.
00:03:45
Speaker
I got my master's in child protection, which ultimately led me to child advocacy more and child liberation theology, which I know we'll talk about later.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:57
Speaker
You know, without getting into like the gruesome war stories, I'm wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on the kinds of abuse and neglect that happen in homeschooling.
00:04:08
Speaker
I mean, every sort of abuse you can imagine happens in there.
00:04:12
Speaker
But the patterns, there's some significant ones around physical abuse of children, especially corporal punishment.
00:04:18
Speaker
I'd say pretty much all the
00:04:20
Speaker
you know, quote unquote, parenting experts in the homeschooling circles, they advocate for not just spanking, but like very systematic and severe spankings that are meant to, quote unquote, break the will of the child.
00:04:36
Speaker
You're having these messages that are coming from the very top of the homeschool power structures that are saying, you know, this is the correct way to
00:04:44
Speaker
discipline your kids.
00:04:45
Speaker
And so you see a lot more physical abuse, I'd say, than you'd see in some other communities.
00:04:53
Speaker
You also have a denial, a very common denial of like the reality of mental health issues.
00:05:00
Speaker
So, you know, children are going to be experiencing a lot of neglect regarding mental health issues, not going to be getting therapy or psychiatric medication or whatever it may be.
00:05:12
Speaker
Parents don't believe
00:05:14
Speaker
those are like real things or they're the result of like some sin inside the kid instead of being an actual real disease.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:23
Speaker
And that's interesting that you mentioned it being a sin inside the kid.
00:05:28
Speaker
So when you're talking about these homeschool communities, are these specifically religious homeschooling communities or is this something that you see in secular ones as well?
00:05:38
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the things that I experienced are going to be specific to evangelical homeschooling, which is a subset.
00:05:50
Speaker
You know, it's not the entirety of homeschoolers, but it is the most significant subset.
00:05:56
Speaker
The statistics that I've seen are that between 90 to 94% of homeschoolers pre-pandemic, obviously the pandemic has likely changed things in some significant ways regarding the demographics of homeschooling.
00:06:13
Speaker
But pre-pandemic, the numbers were like 90 to 94% of homeschoolers are conservative Christians specifically.
00:06:20
Speaker
So that's a pretty large percentage.
00:06:26
Speaker
And at the same time, I also want to give a shout out to all the homeschoolers who are trying valiantly to do homeschooling in a very different way and trying to empower children rather than break their wills like a lot of evangelical homeschoolers want to do.
Regulation and Resistance in Homeschooling
00:06:45
Speaker
So your work is based around really combating this and figuring out structural ways that essentially these abuses do not happen.
00:06:55
Speaker
Right now, are there any regulations regarding all of this?
00:07:00
Speaker
Or is this just something that's occurring and parents essentially have the rights and we're trying to change how the laws work?
00:07:09
Speaker
So there's no federal laws whatsoever about homeschooling.
00:07:12
Speaker
So this is going to be based state by state.
00:07:15
Speaker
And there are a handful of states like Massachusetts, and they tend to be the more liberal states that have some oversight of homeschooling.
00:07:24
Speaker
But I would say the vast majority of states do not have any significant oversight of homeschooling.
00:07:30
Speaker
They either won't have laws at all or when they do have laws or requirements, there'll be different exemptions or carve outs that essentially make the rules unenforceable.
00:07:45
Speaker
So I would say there's really not
00:07:47
Speaker
any significant or impactful oversight at the moment.
00:07:54
Speaker
And in terms of like, you know, what I would like to see, I would say I would divide that into like three different categories.
00:08:04
Speaker
The first would be, I mean, would be like communal ones.
00:08:07
Speaker
So this wouldn't necessarily have to be regular regulatory solutions.
00:08:13
Speaker
I think that it's important that a lot that solutions to abuse and neglect in communities not just be regulatory, but they also need to be, you know, from the grassroots and also from the top down in terms of just, you know, who's in charge of the communities.
00:08:28
Speaker
So I think there needs to be community solutions to abuse and neglect.
00:08:32
Speaker
And those could be awareness campaigns being led by the major organizations.
00:08:37
Speaker
It could be requiring background checks for people to join a organization like HSLDA.
00:08:47
Speaker
the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, and then there would be regulatory solutions.
00:08:53
Speaker
And I would divide those into two.
00:08:55
Speaker
One would be child protection and then the other would be education.
00:09:00
Speaker
The child protection ones are the ones that I care about the most.
00:09:04
Speaker
And those would be things like requiring that
00:09:09
Speaker
every homeschool kid has to see a mandatory reporter once a year or has to have, you know, visit, have a doctor exam once a year.
00:09:18
Speaker
So these wouldn't have anything to do with controlling or restricting how parents teach.
00:09:24
Speaker
There would be more best practices that, you know, they wouldn't even have to be targeted to homeschoolers.
00:09:30
Speaker
It could just be a general rule, like school-aged children should be required to see a mandatory reporter once a year or something like that.
00:09:36
Speaker
And then there would be education regulations.
00:09:40
Speaker
Those would be tend to be more controversial and that would be something like requiring portfolio review of homeschool curriculum.
00:09:50
Speaker
That's not my wheelhouse.
00:09:52
Speaker
So it's not what I push or focus on most, but I do know that other homeschool advocates, especially like
00:10:01
Speaker
the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, those organizations do think that things like portfolio reviews or teacher qualification requirements are important.
00:10:14
Speaker
You know, that's interesting when you talk about those different regulations we can put in place.
00:10:19
Speaker
You know, regulations kind of as a word used broadly, I guess interventions maybe is a better one.
00:10:25
Speaker
Like when I hear homeschool regulations, my brain immediately goes to you can put rules on parents or you can put rules on the kids.
00:10:35
Speaker
and a test they have to take or something.
00:10:38
Speaker
But you just talked about so many other directions you could go with that.
00:10:43
Speaker
You can target the advocates who are defending these abusive parents in court.
00:10:50
Speaker
You can target the people who are writing the curriculum.
00:10:53
Speaker
You can target just the general advocacy organizations.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I think that's maybe a helpful way to look at it, like this multi-pronged approach.
00:11:04
Speaker
There's a lot of different places we can kind of put ourselves into the system and try to, or in the way of the system, maybe.
00:11:11
Speaker
I think that, you know, the word regulation is a buzzword that a lot of homeschoolers are afraid of.
00:11:16
Speaker
And I think, you know, when we're talking about any of these solutions, I would always qualify it with the, you know, the fact that we're probably not going to see any of them anytime soon, just because most homeschoolers, and I would include secular ones in this statement, buy into the parental rights absolutism that HSLDA promotes.
00:11:42
Speaker
Uh, so anytime you propose any solution to these issues, you're going to have a very, very strong reaction from the homeschooling community.
00:11:51
Speaker
When I say, you know, throughout all these solutions, I always like to say, you know, I would be happy with like the crumbs.
00:11:56
Speaker
Like if we could get one of those laws, like one visit with a mandatory reporter once a year, like that would be, I would be ecstatic to have something like that.
00:12:06
Speaker
Like that's just, you know, the, the, the deck is stacked so much in the other direction.
00:12:11
Speaker
And is it the case then that the folks that would be most opposed to these solutions would be those who would be kind of more on that authoritarian side?
00:12:23
Speaker
Because we have a lot of folks in our network who would see themselves as unschoolers or progressive educators who have pulled their students from schools because they are unhappy with how the education system is working for their child, not necessarily because they want to
00:12:38
Speaker
ingrain a certain political ideology or control in some way.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's actually kind of the opposite.
00:12:44
Speaker
Is the majority of this flack against these calls for regulation due to the prevalence of the abuse?
00:12:54
Speaker
Or is it like an ideological thing in the sense that it's about control, quite literally, of what they're doing?
00:13:02
Speaker
I would say it's more ideological.
00:13:03
Speaker
I think you have a very strong libertarian anti-government streak among homeschoolers, even including the secular ones.
00:13:15
Speaker
I do think there is a growing number of homeschoolers that I would say are progressive.
Child-First Approach versus Parent-First Approach
00:13:23
Speaker
and are seeing a more a different way to homeschool.
00:13:28
Speaker
I would say that I've kind of distinguished those progressive homeschoolers from the secular ones because the progressive ones could include secular ones and religious ones at the same time.
00:13:38
Speaker
But they have a very like
00:13:42
Speaker
a progressive approach to their pedagogy when they homeschool.
00:13:47
Speaker
And then there's these other secular ones that are very reactionary.
00:13:51
Speaker
And I don't think those are probably the ones that your network speaks to likely, but they definitely exist and are pretty significant.
00:14:00
Speaker
And they're always on HSLDA's side.
00:14:04
Speaker
So how do we walk that line between fighting abuse and promoting homeschooling?
00:14:11
Speaker
And I think that we kind of need we need to reframe that.
00:14:14
Speaker
Like, I don't think that that's that's where the line is.
00:14:16
Speaker
I think that we should be thinking of fighting abuse and promoting homeschooling as like two sides of the same coin.
00:14:24
Speaker
Like the line for me, it goes between those who homeschool with like a child first approach versus those who homeschool with a parent's first approach.
00:14:36
Speaker
You know, those who are homeschooling and putting children's needs and rights
00:14:40
Speaker
foremost versus those who are homeschooling to fulfill, you know, their own needs or wants.
00:14:57
Speaker
Hey there, I hope you're enjoying the podcast so far.
00:15:00
Speaker
I want to take a brief moment and promote something that may interest our listeners, which is our upcoming Conference to Restore Humanity.
00:15:07
Speaker
Our inaugural virtual conference is from July 25th to July 28th, featuring amazing keynotes, including founding theorist of critical pedagogy, Dr. Henry Giroux, and organizer and co-author of Black Lives Matter at School, Dr. Denisha Jones.
00:15:19
Speaker
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00:15:30
Speaker
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00:15:39
Speaker
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00:15:42
Speaker
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00:15:46
Speaker
Tickets are discounted right now at $150 for all four days, with discounts available for underrepresented communities.
00:15:52
Speaker
Now, back to the podcast.
00:16:02
Speaker
I was not homeschooled.
00:16:04
Speaker
I don't really have much experience at all working with folks that were homeschooled.
00:16:09
Speaker
So as you see all of these different, I'm sure most of your work or a lot of your work is interacting with and reading about folks that are abused in homeschooling situations.
00:16:20
Speaker
Do you ever wonder, just conceptually, if the cost of homeschooling outweighs the chance for abuse?
00:16:29
Speaker
A common critique of homeschooling is that homeschooling allows for folks to kind of raise their children without any supervision.
00:16:39
Speaker
And as a result, you know, they're not going to a space that is, a school is a space where a lot of times you identify abuse.
00:16:47
Speaker
You identify things that are going on all the time we're calling about things that are going on at the home that shouldn't be.
00:16:53
Speaker
Does advocating for homeschooling outweigh the potential cost of trying to go within homeschooling and fight the abuse?
00:17:02
Speaker
As in, why cannot the angle be, well, we shouldn't have any homeschooling at all?
00:17:07
Speaker
Well, there are certainly people that believe that, and it wouldn't be that in the United States, there's gonna be all sorts of people freaking out that we're even talking about it.
Diverse Educational Options and Children's Needs
00:17:17
Speaker
But if you went to some European countries, like they either have banned or heavily regulate homeschooling.
00:17:24
Speaker
That's a heated question, but not so much elsewhere.
00:17:27
Speaker
And I think that is part of American DNA, honestly, is like we have a very strong
00:17:36
Speaker
you know, independent libertarian streak, regardless of our ideologies that has just kind of cut across American society.
00:17:45
Speaker
I don't personally think that we should ban homeschooling.
00:17:48
Speaker
I
00:17:50
Speaker
Certainly at many times, you know, I've been advocating for homeschool kids now for years and homeschool parents and homeschool leaders can be extremely infuriating.
00:18:01
Speaker
And sometimes I just want to throw out my hands and just be like, fine, we should just ban you all.
00:18:06
Speaker
But I really don't think we should or well, we can't, but we also shouldn't because I think that
00:18:14
Speaker
There need to be options for children who experience abuse and neglect in public school and or private school.
00:18:22
Speaker
I read all these heartbreaking stories about kids that, you know, have died from abuse and neglect and homeschooling.
00:18:27
Speaker
Then there are also the same stories where, you know, some kid was...
00:18:32
Speaker
trans and in public school and was being bullied and was begging their parents to homeschool them and the parents didn't.
00:18:40
Speaker
And then the, you know, the kid killed themselves.
00:18:43
Speaker
And that's a perfect example of why there needs to be space for people to approach education in different ways.
00:18:52
Speaker
And, and for me, it is, you know, all this, everything has to come back to like, what is putting the children's needs and rights first.
00:19:01
Speaker
Like for me, that's the important issue.
00:19:03
Speaker
When we were talking about what, what should parents, you know, be able to do or do not like for me, that's kind of the wrong focus.
00:19:09
Speaker
Like the focus for me is on like, what do the kids want and what do the kids need?
00:19:14
Speaker
That for me, you know, education should be about the children.
00:19:17
Speaker
It's their education.
00:19:18
Speaker
I mean, and honestly, if a child says, I don't want to go to public school, I want to be homeschooled.
00:19:22
Speaker
Like, I feel like that should be within their rights.
00:19:25
Speaker
That last point is, I think something that we all at human restoration projects and a lot on our network can really get behind.
00:19:33
Speaker
And no matter how you feel about homeschooling regulation, like, yeah, kids should be able to choose what is, how they want to spend their time and what kind of life and what kind of education is good for them.
00:19:44
Speaker
And I love that way you talk about it of it's not about do we advocate for homeschooling or do we advocate for regulation?
00:19:52
Speaker
Like we advocate for homeschooling by trying to make it better and by trying to make it safer.
00:19:58
Speaker
I think I see a parallel in that to the work that we do at Human Restoration Projects.
00:20:02
Speaker
We advocate for public schools.
00:20:05
Speaker
And we do that by trying to fix the problems in it and make it a better place for kids.
00:20:11
Speaker
Now, with all that, and I don't say this to push back, but just to kind of add, when we talk about the progressive homeschoolers, whether they call themselves unschoolers or
00:20:21
Speaker
whatever label that they use, there's definitely a large contingent that is not white.
00:20:28
Speaker
I'm thinking about the Black and Indigenous homeschoolers who are, their families in the communities have not generally been treated well by public school systems or other government interventions in general, not treated well by CPS and always kind of having
00:20:45
Speaker
the wrong assumptions put on them.
00:20:48
Speaker
Obviously, being very far away from that community myself, I'm making assumptions here, but I could imagine being in that community and not being excited about a check-in with a mandatory reporter or some other intervention like that.
00:21:02
Speaker
So I was wondering what you would say to that.
00:21:05
Speaker
A few things.
00:21:06
Speaker
I mean, the first is that I totally get it.
00:21:09
Speaker
You know, I have a master's in child protection.
00:21:12
Speaker
I have, you know, read books like Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds.
00:21:18
Speaker
So I would totally, you know, I wouldn't argue with people that would say like the CPS system is racist and broken and has all sorts of problems.
00:21:27
Speaker
And
00:21:29
Speaker
I mean, frankly, I have never been to public school other than to take like the SAT, but I have seen enough evidence to know that those statements could be given about the public school system too.
00:21:39
Speaker
Like yes to all that.
00:21:41
Speaker
At the same time, you know, we still need to have, in my mind, we still need to have some standards and safeguards in place to protect children and children.
00:21:51
Speaker
So we have to find a way to balance that.
00:21:55
Speaker
My main thought when you're talking about homeschoolers of color is that the white homeschoolers who tend to be the evangelicals, they're specifically marketing and trying to target the homeschoolers of color to get them on their side of this parental rights absolutism.
Child Liberation Theology Explained
00:22:15
Speaker
especially during the pandemic, like HSLDA, the largest homeschool lobby in the lobbying organization in the world.
00:22:22
Speaker
And they're a far right organization.
00:22:24
Speaker
Like they created websites.
00:22:26
Speaker
They started giving out grants to specifically targeting homeschoolers of color.
00:22:30
Speaker
If you read a lot of the articles that came out during the pandemic that were like talking about the boom in the homeschoolers of color, you'll see that like almost all of them mentioned HSLDA or like the
00:22:43
Speaker
The leader that is mentioned is actually an HSLDA leader as well.
00:22:49
Speaker
There's a lot of unfortunate subterfuge going on as well with all that.
00:22:55
Speaker
I think people need to really be aware of if we're going to try to fight that line between child-first homeschooling and parents-first homeschooling.
00:23:05
Speaker
And I think that probably makes a good segue into your specific work, which is child liberation theology.
00:23:13
Speaker
And I know you're writing right now a series on this on your website, which we'll link to in the show notes.
00:23:20
Speaker
But could you just provide kind of a basic overview of what that is?
00:23:24
Speaker
And then also talk about how it's both important in a religious context, but also potentially in a secular context.
00:23:31
Speaker
Well, to explain child liberation theology, we should first start with liberation theology.
00:23:37
Speaker
Liberation theology, probably the easiest way to describe it is it's a theology of self-determination.
00:23:44
Speaker
It is a way of looking at and thinking about God and the Bible and Jesus.
00:23:51
Speaker
a way that enables marginalized people groups to think about and speak about God and the Bible on their own terms, in their own ways, answering their own questions with their own language.
00:24:06
Speaker
And there's
00:24:06
Speaker
Liberation theologies for potentially for every marginalized people group.
00:24:11
Speaker
It first started with black theologians, James Cone, and then it went to Latin America.
00:24:19
Speaker
Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest, wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation.
00:24:26
Speaker
So James Cone and Gustavo Gutierrez kind of launched the movement.
00:24:31
Speaker
And then since then, pretty much any marginalized people group you can think of, they have a liberation theology.
00:24:37
Speaker
So there's one for people with disabilities.
00:24:40
Speaker
There's a queer liberation theology.
00:24:43
Speaker
There's theologies, liberation theologies for Native Americans.
00:24:48
Speaker
There are ones for other nationalities, like there's a Korean liberation theology.
00:24:54
Speaker
There's never been one for children.
00:24:57
Speaker
After getting my master's in child protection, I've studied liberation theology for a long time.
00:25:02
Speaker
And so I was like, there's got to be one for kids, right?
00:25:06
Speaker
And so I looked it up and I found one book that was written 25 years ago by a woman named Janet Pice.
00:25:12
Speaker
It's called Suffer the Children.
00:25:13
Speaker
And it's a theology of liberation for children specifically abused or neglected, but not this kind of more general idea of child liberation theology.
00:25:23
Speaker
Her book blew my mind and I wanted to kind of generalize that and expand it.
00:25:29
Speaker
So that brought me to child liberation theology.
00:25:33
Speaker
I feel like I should interject just for some of our audience that maybe isn't familiar with
00:25:39
Speaker
a lot of these issues in this language, because you were talking about liberation theology as a way for marginalized, for historically marginalized groups to think about God and the Bible in their own terms, and not even groups, but for individuals too as well.
00:25:52
Speaker
So I feel like we should explain for our audience that this is in direct contrast to the white American evangelical church in which the dominant mode is you show up to church on Sunday or sometimes other times during the week.
00:26:08
Speaker
The teacher tells you what to think about God and how to interpret a particular passage of scripture.
00:26:15
Speaker
And they tell you not only what to believe about that, but how to incorporate into your life.
00:26:19
Speaker
And so it's a very, very much a receiving mode.
00:26:22
Speaker
The American evangelical church, which is primarily white, but being evangelical tends to spread its beliefs into other groups as well.
00:26:30
Speaker
That's kind of the mode that they've been in.
00:26:33
Speaker
Oh yeah, so there's two stages.
00:26:35
Speaker
One involves adults.
00:26:37
Speaker
So this would be adults using their power and privilege and faith communities to create the situations and opportunity to scaffold, really.
00:26:51
Speaker
And...
00:26:53
Speaker
build communities that are empowering and lifting up children.
00:26:57
Speaker
And then the second half of child liberation theology is really the part of the self-determination part in which
00:27:04
Speaker
we would be passing everything on to children to be able to take on for themselves.
00:27:09
Speaker
And so this is, you know, connects with what you were just talking about, Thomas, is that, you know, one way that we would implement child liberation theology is we have to challenge and change the way that we educate children about religion.
00:27:25
Speaker
You know, most of the evangelical church is the white evangelical church in the United States.
00:27:32
Speaker
You know, they,
00:27:33
Speaker
have a banking model of education, which you were describing as like that receiving model, you know, where there's this absolute truth and there's the people that know it and they're, you know, passing that down to the receptive people and they're just taking in that information.
00:27:51
Speaker
And that is, you know, a way, a model of education that I think needs to be challenged and changed.
00:27:59
Speaker
You know, we need to have...
00:28:00
Speaker
I think education is best when people are personally invested in it and interested in it.
00:28:07
Speaker
So I think that letting children have the rights to their own education is a change that needs to be made, not just in school, like I know that is your project, but also in church, the way that faith communities interact with and treat children.
00:28:27
Speaker
In some ways, it's even so much more important in faith communities.
00:28:32
Speaker
I think about in just a regular K through 12 classroom, you can use the banking model of education or you can use more a liberatory model.
00:28:42
Speaker
Obviously, it's not just one or the other.
00:28:44
Speaker
There's all kinds of gradations.
00:28:46
Speaker
But generally speaking,
00:28:48
Speaker
The trade-off that you're making, the choices that you're making, is that the banking model is easier.
00:28:55
Speaker
The structures of school are built around it.
00:28:58
Speaker
It's easier to implement.
00:29:00
Speaker
Everybody knows what to expect.
00:29:01
Speaker
But the learning is not going to be as deep.
00:29:03
Speaker
Students don't take ownership of the learning.
Dangers and Empowerment in Homeschooling
00:29:06
Speaker
They won't be as engaged.
00:29:09
Speaker
It won't be meaningful to them after they've left your class.
00:29:12
Speaker
And that's important.
00:29:14
Speaker
But when I look at that same question applied to faith communities, it's like, it's actually dangerous to use that banking model because often what they're teaching is how do you order your life?
00:29:27
Speaker
How does God, like the creator of the universe, want you to order your life?
00:29:32
Speaker
How does it, how should men and women differentiate from each other?
00:29:37
Speaker
And these things are like, once a single kid walks into that setting who is
00:29:42
Speaker
doesn't fit that mold that they're being given.
00:29:46
Speaker
It just is like immense harm to them.
00:29:49
Speaker
That kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier of like the cost of homeschooling.
00:29:53
Speaker
And that's the part that always makes me hesitate is that like homeschooling potentially has this ability to give parents like
00:30:06
Speaker
absolute 100% control over their child.
00:30:09
Speaker
Like if you live in a state where you don't have to register your child when they're born, like you could have a kid and raise them, you know, off grid their entire lives and literally no one knows they exist.
00:30:21
Speaker
Like when we have this completely free for all approach to education that has no respect whatsoever for like the rights of the children themselves, you create this,
00:30:35
Speaker
uh totalistic environment basically the possibility for it well i think right like how many tara westovers are there who never wrote exactly exactly i mean you know i know there are i know there are thousands of people who have that same story um and those are the people that live to tell it so that's the part that chills me so
00:30:58
Speaker
The cost of homeschooling, like it's worth it to keep it if we're talking about homeschooling that actually respects the rights of children.
00:31:06
Speaker
If we're talking about completely hands-off homeschooling, I don't think that's worth it.
00:31:11
Speaker
I think that's just an interesting way to broaden that scope in general for both secular and non-secular communities of just being able to recognize that self-determination theory leads to a greater understanding of the world in general, both in terms of interests, because if someone just tells you exactly what to do, you might wane from your interest in that thing, but also because it's such a narrow scope when you're told exactly what to do.
00:31:38
Speaker
in the exact same way that a lot of people grew up and hate reading because in English class they make you read certain books or like well don't don't think they're a math person because they just didn't understand how the math teacher explicitly told them how to do different things and what even math was a topic I would imagine that the exact same exclusivity and authoritarianism has the same impact on teaching a faith so your interest in faith your attachment to God your
00:32:07
Speaker
ability to understand the scripture, as Thomas was just saying, all of those different things kind of go hand in hand.
00:32:13
Speaker
And it just makes me wonder then how child liberation theology promotes a religious education, not just from avoiding the negative, like avoiding feeling controlled, but also promoting the positive in the sense that young people would be more interested in being accepted by their faith.
00:32:32
Speaker
They're just more interested in general in what they're doing.
00:32:35
Speaker
the easiest and probably the you know, what's going to sound the strangest.
00:32:40
Speaker
But the most concrete example I could give would be like putting children in positions of leadership in church like I know.
00:32:48
Speaker
And I know that that's
00:32:49
Speaker
that's kind of a radical concept in school too.
00:32:52
Speaker
There's some experimental schools where they let children like interview the potential teachers and vote on them and those sorts of things.
00:33:00
Speaker
I think we need that in the church.
00:33:01
Speaker
Like we need to be actually like letting children have some agency and be able to exercise it and
00:33:09
Speaker
Exact same thing.
00:33:10
Speaker
I think they should be able to vote on their Sunday school teacher.
00:33:12
Speaker
I should.
00:33:13
Speaker
I think they should be.
00:33:14
Speaker
We should be soliciting their perspective and input on the curriculum, their own curriculums.
00:33:19
Speaker
Like, I think we need to start.
00:33:21
Speaker
We empower children by allowing them to participate.
Church's Evolving Role in Community and Experience
00:33:25
Speaker
I mean, I'm wondering how you get a church to do that, how you get them to welcome children into their leadership and into their theology making.
00:33:36
Speaker
Because the thing that automatically comes to my mind, and this leads into a much bigger conversation that we may not have time for, but...
00:33:45
Speaker
you're going to need a church to, you're going to need their focus to be on like community and experience rather than on dogma and teaching.
00:33:55
Speaker
Because if your whole organization, your whole institution is built around passing certain teachings and beliefs and dogma from one generation to the next, you're never going to welcome kids into positions of power other than the very, very select few who are like,
00:34:14
Speaker
the preacher's kid who never rebelled or something, you know, like there's the very, very few, but yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
So I don't know what you think of that.
00:34:21
Speaker
I feel like that's the million dollar question.
00:34:24
Speaker
Um, and I mean, that could be applied to really any other marginalized people group, like when it comes to church or, or any other faith community where you have, you know, centuries of,
00:34:38
Speaker
excluding people from fully participating in church or whatever the community may be.
Final Thoughts on Child Advocacy and Education Rights
00:34:45
Speaker
So I think that in my mind, the best we can do is imagine a better future and talk about it.
00:34:51
Speaker
Like even if 99% of the churches will never want to even entertain the idea.
00:34:59
Speaker
I mean, if we can get, you know, the more we can get people to
00:35:03
Speaker
rethink some of their ideas about how they interact with children, how they interact with other people, how they, you know, pass on information and education.
00:35:14
Speaker
You know, we got to start with the small things if we're going to ever change the big things.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, but fundamentally it's the same question as how do we let historically marginalized identities into the seats of power in our businesses, our government, our schools?
00:35:31
Speaker
How do we do that without it becoming kind of a token representation where we just choose the few who are not going to rock the boat?
00:35:41
Speaker
How do we actually change the power dynamics there?
00:35:44
Speaker
Child advocacy and the child liberation theology, for me,
00:35:48
Speaker
You know, all these things come down to, you know, advocating for the children themselves.
00:35:52
Speaker
Like, I want to make sure that whatever rules or regulations or solutions you want to propose to any of the problems in homeschooling, like, you know, we need to be making sure that in everything that we're doing with children that we are...
00:36:07
Speaker
you know, not being selfish that we are realizing that, you know, children are their own human beings and they have a right to their own lives and their own educations.
00:36:20
Speaker
So if we're, in my mind, if we're doing that in whatever context, whether it's school or church or any other community, then I think that that's the right path.
00:36:35
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
00:36:38
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:36:42
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.