Sophie Christophy

Children are people, not property - Series 1, Episode 3

In this episode of Queers & Co., I’m joined by Sophie Christophy, feminist, children’s rights activist and co-founder of a self-directed, consent and rights based education setting called the Cabin.

We chat about children’s rights and how the dominant parent culture is a representation of patriarchy, how schooling is not designed to allow for individuality, queering education and the importance of ed positivity.

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co.

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D’Souza

Resources

Sophie’s website

Follow Sophie on Twitter

Follow Sophie on Facebook

The Cabin, a self-directed setting Sophie co-founded with Sarah Stollery. Find out more here.

Sophie is a trustee for The Phoenix Education Trust

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Find out more here

Ban the Booths campaign

bell hooks. Find out more about her work here.

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. Available here.

Full Transcription

Gem: Hi Sophie.

Sophie:  Hi Gem. How are you?

Gem: I'm good, thank you. How are you?

Sophie:  I'm fine, thank you. I'm fine.

Gem: Good and so I'm really excited to talk to you and it feels a bit weird because we're friends in real life. It would be really great for other people than me if you could introduce yourself.

Sophie:  Yeah, sure. Okay. So I'm Sophie. I have a few hats. I'm a children's rights activist fundamentally but I am also the Co-Director of a consent-based self-directed education setting called The Cabin. And I'm a trustee for an education charity called the Phoenix Trust as well as being a parent to two children who are unschooled and yeah, living life basically. I'd say that's probably a summary for the moment.

Gem: There's lots to explore there. I guess lots of new terms that people might not have come across if they're not familiar with unschooling or home ed for example. So I guess my first question will probably be the fundamentals of what are children's rights.

Sophie:  Okay. Sothere's a legal document, which is helpful, called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And it was created over a couple of decades actually and finally ratified in 1990 by the UK but every country in the world has, symbolically at least ratified the treaty apart from the United States.

Gem: Interesting!

Sophie:  I know it's a long story. The UNCRC lays out a whole bunch of rights that apply to all people aged under 18 and it was created largely to recognise the fact that that group have particular vulnerabilities in our society that other groups may not have in quite the same way and are deserving of a list of rights basically to help support them in living in a dignified and respected way. Like I said it was ratified by the UK in 1990 so it's been around for a while now but what I've found over my time of engaging with this issue is that it's not that widely known and it's not that widely practised, is the kind of important part. But I mean the basic principles of it are that children are people, they're not property of anyone, that their rights holders, that they are entitled to a voice, that they're entitled to be themselves and to live a full life. I would say that's the basics.

Gem: Yeah and I guess they sound like obvious things, but when you dig a bit deeper, you realise that children actually don't benefit from a lot of those rights in multiple scenarios.

Sophie:  Yeah, definitely. I mean, traditionally family culture the culture we have in schools, kind of general social norms and values don't accommodate children's rights. The norm doesn't sit in a place that makes the UNCRC easy. You know? And so it was realising that that my activism, I would say, because I think it's one thing to feel as an individual that perhaps our culture around childhood and children isn't right but it's another thing when you realise that actually there is kind of a legal consequence to that and the responsibility that people have mutually agreed to that isn't being upheld. And that's the point at which I sort of realised that this is a social justice issue and not just an opinion

Gem: Yeah and I know we've talked before together that, well I definitely have come across it and I don't want to assume that you have, but I imagine you might have, that when you're in other circles with other activists doing work in other spheres, they're generally aware of potentially other movements or other marginalised groups, but not children. And I find it really frustrating when I come across people, particularly queer people so in my own community who wouldn't dream of saying something about another marginalised group but will be really negative about children.

Sophie:  Yeah. It's, it's really fascinating actually. And I think even when you get into intersectional feminism and are working towards appreciating how different identities and different circumstances and oppressions overlap and converge and affect each other to, you know, create an overall experience it's not common at the moment for the condition of childhood to be included in intersectionality. Like you said, it will usually include issues around race, issues around gender and sexuality, issues around ability and disability. But children are not included generally in that approach and that lens which is fascinating because it's the one experience of oppression that everyone has. And it's also the space where we learn all the others. So in a way childhood should be the base starting point to understand why we have all of these other issues in society. And knowing that because of discrimination and prejudice against children, knowing that that's what makes these other oppressions possible is critical. Because if you don't, if you're not taking that perspective, then you're essentially trying to fight the fire by throwing water at the flames rather than coming to the root cause of it. And you can't make lasting change unless we address how children are socialised.

Gem: Absolutely. And this idea of like having agency that all of a sudden when you're say 18, now okay, you can make decisions for yourself and you can live the life that you want to, but you haven't grown up understanding how that actually looks and so everyone's sort of re-learning or I guess just making it up for themselves as soon as they get to adulthood and then they return their experiences on their children if they have children and just think it's like normal parenting. I wonder if we could give some really kind of clear examples of where maybe parents might be going against the UNCRC basically.

Sophie:  Well, I think probably every parent, unless they're actively and consciously engaging with the idea of children's rights, will not be behaving in a way that's in accordance with rights because it's contrary to our mainstream culture of parenthood. And it's very difficult to be in relationship with your children in a way that's different to the relationship you were in with your own parents, unless you're making a really intentional effort to think critically about your own childhood experience and to allow yourself to explore alternatives. Our dominant parenting culture is literally a representation of patriarchal dynamic. It's a power-over dynamic where the parents are in a position of unaccountable authority. I mean that's not necessarily true or what will happen in their relationship life if they behave in that way, but that's the perception that a parent has unaccountable authority and the child is a passive recipient of that authority and isn't entitled to a voice. I mean they might be privileged to some agency and some voice, you know, in the relationship at times, but it's not seen as their fundamental rights. And yeah, I mean it's, it's difficult. The relationship between the parent and the child is, I think, the most difficult place to be activated in because it's so emotional and it requires people to engage in a lot of personal exploration at a time when they are really busy and quite vulnerable because they've just become a parent. Yeah. Sorry, can you remind me of your question?

Gem: No, it was great. I was just going to ask if there were to sort of... We can both do it, whether there are any real life examples where... because I think talking about this in the abstract, people would probably be on board, but if they realise maybe what parenting they experienced or potentially what parenting they are giving to other children, what does that look like? What are those examples?

Sophie:  Yeah. I guess anytime a parent feels that they are acting in an identity that is other than themselves in order to be a parent, that's a warning sign. So if they feel like they're having to behave like an authority or a police person or you know, but that they're moving into that place. So it's like things for example around policing your child's body, telling them what they should or shouldn't wear, what they should or shouldn't look like, you know, controlling how they have their hair, controlling what food they put in their mouth, how much of it and when. Those are all areas where you think, "Hang on, what is the power dynamic here? Is this between people that are considering themselves to be equitable or is this where one person is really considering themselves to have authority over the other and to essentially own the other one? I think it looks like also when the parent is engaging in a good or bad binary with that child; that something that they do could be good or something that they do could just be bad and punishable. Then that's also another example. Also when there's a response to something that a child does or says that looks like wanting to make them feel worse to change their behaviour, then that is another example of behaviour that isn't rights respecting. I think when I first became aware of this issue, I was just a bit overwhelmed because everywhere that I went with my own children and was with other families, it was like triggering constantly because of how normalised it is for parents to behave in a way that isn't respectful to their children. I mean, if a parent grabs that child and pulls them across the place, you know, unless they're in imminent danger, right? Like unless there's a genuine, real threat. If they're just taking their child, as if they're an object like that isn't rights respecrting.

Gem: Yeah. And the thing that I found really useful when I first sort of started looking into it was to think about how you talk to say a friend or a family member compared to how you might talk to a child. And if you wouldn't say that to a friend or a family member, then why the hell are you saying it to a child?

Sophie:  Yeah, definitely. I mean, language and speech is so important with this because we have a tendency to have a really patronising way of interacting with children, like a diminishing way, even if you're saying something nice, you know?

Gem: Oh aren't you cute?

Sophie:  Yeah, when you think you're being complimentary and oftentimes that's the thing is, you know, none of this behaviour generally speaking is coming from a place of malice or unkindness or ill intent. It's not that people want to be mean children, quite on the contrary. I think generally people feel within themselves that desire to be loved by and show love to children, but it's about how that manifests in behaviour and what impression that leaves on the child and the extent how that then affects that child's perception of themselves. And if you're constantly being patronised or you're constantly having your own identity reduced to like really strict gender binary for example, which is so so common where I think maybe for want of something else to focus on an adult will really emphasise their perception of a child's gender identity in the interaction. So everything's centered around, "Oh, you're such a good girl" and has a strong lean towards stereotypical girly things, for example, in that relationship.

Gem: Or "He's such a typical boy isn't he? He's so wild or like running around all the time. A typical boy.

Sophie:  Yeah. And you just wouldn't, you don't see that in adult life. Like if you walk down the street, and you look around you, you're going to see a huge diversity in the people that are there. I mean, I think we'd see a lot more if children were raised in a rights respecting way because they would be a lot freer in adulthood to express themselves than they currently are. But even now, you see women with short hair, with long hair, dressed in more masculine ways, dressed in more feminine ways and the same for guys, but the fact that there's such a gap between that and how children are allowed in our society to be and to present themselves is another example of how adults project and control children into a particular way that doesn't acknowledge their individuality, doesn't acknowledge their own potential exploration of themselves.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. And so I guess that feeds into the idea of schooling. So we've talked... Well, the thing is, I feel like there are so many questions that it'd be useful to cover. I guess it would be good maybe if we can chat a bit about how that feeds into school. We have this kind of situation at home where children are oppressed essentially by the traditional parenting methods and then they go to school and then what?

Sophie:  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, there's a couple of things to mention as we get into this. Firstly, I want to acknowledge that there are definitely people within the mainstream education system that have strong desire for change and there are people within the system who are doing their best to create a more respectful culture for children that are in their schools. So I want to just make that clear because when we talk about this, we're talking about an institution and a system, you know, rather than wanting to cause pain to individuals, right? So that's really important to say. Second thing I think that is important to say is that the tradition of schooling was never designed to be rights respecting. So in its construct, the design of it, doesn't make it easy for children to be respected. That's due to lots and lots of factors. Traditional schooling started before children's rights existed, a long time before and it was created through definitely a patriarchal lens. And there's lots of limiting beliefs about children that went towards how schooling manifested and loads of things we can explore in the history of that. But those two factors are important before we start doing critique. Schooling is not designed to allow for individuality. It's not designed to allow for curiosity, really. Not in a broad sense. There's often policies in place that limit and police children in ways that are unnecessary and aren't for health or safety reasons. They're not in their best interests. You know, the whole dynamic of schooling as a principal doesn't account for the personhood of a child. It requires children to be the property of the school because they're being coerced and forced to learn particular things that are decided by other people. That relationship isn't mutual. It's not collaborative. It's one where it's one of imposition and that is a big problem if you want it to be rights respecting.

Gem: Yeah. And I know you've shared quite a few things recently around isolation or the removal of toilets or the conversion of toilets into isolation units and I just wondered if you could say a bit more about that maybe.

Sophie:  Yeah. I mean I think one of the things that came up for me in my research around the education system was how unprotected children are actually in school and how much free reign schools have in terms of giving out or delivering on what they would see as like punishment or consequences. At the moment, schools aren't regulated in their use of isolation rooms, isolation booths, which is really worrying and I mean, it's in breach of human rights. You can't put someone in isolation for just an arbitrary amount of time, it's just not right. And lots of places outside of schools you wouldn't be allowed. So the problem that is happening is that some schools are putting young people in isolation for long periods of time in conditions that are unacceptable for perceived misdemeanours that are quite nominal. For example, if they have the wrong colour socks on, if they have the wrong type of shoe on, if their hair is looking a particular way, I mean other things which are also rights issues. But it's awful. There's research to suggest that it's very bad for children's mental health. It should be obvious that being isolated in that way isn't good. It's not healthy. And what's great is that a campaign has emerged from within the system to challenge this and to ask for guidance around it from the government to try and protect children within schools. It's called Ban the Booths if you want to look it up.

Gem: Great, I'll put that in the show notes as well. And so I guess we could talk a lot about school and the different ways that children's rights aren't respected, but maybe it'd be interesting to talk instead about what the alternatives are. We both are not sending our children to school. And yeah, there, there are different options available. I guess if people are listening and thinking, " Okay, well you're saying school is so bad, but then what's the alternative?"

Sophie:  Yeah, definitely and I'm a solutions-oriented person so for me, once I realised that there was a problem with school in terms of rights and children's experience and that that was such a big problem - it's a systemic problem, that I wasn't going to find this one great school where it wasn't a problem, then it really pushed me to think about, like you said, what's the alternative then? What's the solution? Because when you have children in your life that you're responsible for, it's no good just thinking how maybe in 10 years there'll be progress or wouldn't it be great if this happened somewhere in the distant future? You have an immediate problem that you have to solve in your own family and decisions that you have to make. So I mean the first thing that happened for me was once I had accepted that school wasn't going to be an option, was that then you become a home educator because that's the alternative to school and it's a legal right for parents to educate their children outside of school. And then I was like, okay, so now what? Because home education is just not going to school, it's not an educational philosophy in its own right. So then I started to consider and explore so what would a rights respecting education look like? What does that environment look like? What's the dynamic of it? What do we need? If you're gonna create and design an education system in alignment with children's rights, how does it need to look? And I took a few years exploring that and I ran some projects in the community to see how it might work because I remember watching this great clip about orangutans that had been orphaned and in their nurseries, they have to have modelled to them how to be an orangutan because if they don't see it, then they can't be it. And that was such a useful reminder to me of that saying, if you can't see it, it's hard to be it. And there wasn't something really for me to see, you know, to understand what was going to come next. There are some really good examples of more rights respecting spaces and democratic schools, which I explored. But in the end I came to the conclusion that really the most important element of all of it was that it was consensual. And so long as it was a consensual environment, then it would be fine. That covered all the bases to me. So in the end after a lot of planning and preparation and, like I said, practice projects and so on, in January of 2018, I co-founded with Sarah Stollery a setting called The Cabin which is a rights respecting setting, explicitly rights respecting by design and it's consent based. It's exciting and it's good to have a model that's up that to me represents the progress that's needed and where we're able to be in that practice to help us understand the blind spots that exist in society where people have only known school.

Gem: Yeah. What does that look like on a practical level? So you talk about self-directed education for example. So how are the children self-directing their education in the space?

Sophie:  Oh, it looks great, Gem. It makes me so excited to talk about it. I love it!

Gem: I should also...

Sophie:  Yeah, are you gonna do a disclaimer that your daughter comes?

Gem: Yeah, I was gonna say I should also mention that we're huge fans because my daughter goes but go on.

Sophie:  Yeah, it's an honour to have you as a parent with us. So what does it look like? I mean self direction basically is that you're trusting yourself to know what you need to learn and what you need to do. It's about tuning in to that voice inside of you. That part, like I would say, depending on what you're comfortable with, it's like a heart-spaced place to learn from, with a bit of head stuff going on too but ultimately you're listening to your body, you're listening to yourself, you're thinking critically around it, and then you navigate your learning experience yourself. I mean, the nice thing about the cabin is that you're then able to do that in community and in relationship with other people. So there's lots of scope for collaboration. So what it looks like in practice is a really dynamic space where a group of children of mixed ages and adults are at different times doing different things. Sometimes there's collaborations happening - oftentimes, you know. Usually the group splits down into subgroups I would say to like make things they want to have happen. So at any one time you could have some people outside building dens, some people working on a Harry Potter play, some people sewing some people reading in a corner, some people working together on exploring something they're interested in. So for example, this week I was collaborating with someone on a session about planets in the solar system. We were doing that together and offering that to other people. And it just it's very vibrant and alive. The children are free to move in the space how they would like to, whether that's inside or outside. So it's a really nature-connected environment as well that you can go and be outside and we love it when birds fly over and we can have a look or we had a deer out the back the other day, which was super nice. And we also go out. So we can go down into the village and just explore freely like that too, which is really, really nice to be connected also to the community outside of our walls. Is that a good description? I mean, I don't want to give the impression that we don't have a frame because we definitely do have a frame and that's really important. For people to feel free, they need to first feel safe, I believe. Yeah.

Gem: Yeah. And then kind of explore within that and I guess from our point of view as a family parenting a child who goes to that kind of setting - 1. I've noticed a massive increase in confidence and ability to communicate with other people to understand what someone needs and be able to express that. And I think also just in terms of practical skills, like my daughter when she was seven, I think there were three children from The Cabin that chaired a meeting. Was it for 16 grownups?

Sophie:  Yeah, we ran a workshop for other people that want to create similar types of spaces and we invited anyone from The Cabin community that has done the chair training to chair a meeting, to help us host that essentially. So welcoming people to come and then chairing the actual introductory meeting for the people that come and yeah, I think it was about 16 or 17 people came to that workshop and your daughter chaired which is great.

Gem: Yeah. And just to see... I mean I don't know that I know how to chair a meeting entirely now, so maybe I could do with some chair training. But seeing that those children in that space... and also something I think is really important to notice is not only seeing that they have those kinds of skills and children as young as five can be learning to do chair training at The Cabin, but also the way that those children, and I think a lot of home educated children in our community communicate with adults. They don't talk to them as though they're these kind of... Well they actually talk to them because I know when I was a child I was scared to talk to adults. It was kind of just like yes or no and look away. So they have conversations, but they also have conversations with them like they are people and actual humans rather than there being this kind of weird power dynamic or the parents don't patronise the children. They just have conversations as equals. And I think that's really something that people often comment on when we're out and about in other situations that both my children just talk to people like they're people. So yeah, I guess what I'm saying, is there are innumerable skills that come from that.

Sophie:  Yeah. And it's very interesting because like I said, a lot of what I'm doing is quite innovative and so we are following hypotheses quite a lot of the time. I'm self-experimenting with it and I'm also in this relationship with my own children. So I feel like that I have a sense of competence around it just through my own anecdotal experience, I would say. But this is kind of like frontier-type stuff, but what's nice is when research comes up separately to reinforce our practice. And I notice some research came out with the Sutton Trust the other day that cited some research that had been done looking at what... Okay, so this is kind of like getting back into the activist-y chat, but it basically said that one of the big reasons why the elite group, and they were framing that as people that have gone to private school, had more social influence was not just their socioeconomic background, but it was to do with the relational dynamic in the private school. And what it said was that because the young people in the private schools see themselves as equals with the teachers, it then means that in their life they feel themselves to be equitable to people in authority. So when they're negotiating, when they're asking for things, their understanding of themselves in relation to the people in power is very different to what you would get in someone theoretically who's been in a more traditional relational dynamic in school where they perceive themselves to be submissive to the authority and not equals at all. And the research from the Sutton Trust strongly suggests that that is one of the most key factors in being able to make social change or being able to achieve the things that you want in the world that you live in. So even if the only thing that happens for children that comes to The Cabin is they perceive themselves to be equally human to the people in positions of responsibility, that has a huge potential consequence in terms of the world we live in at large. Because those people will go on believing themselves as they should because this is just what's true, right? People in authority are not better or more entitled to determine our lives than we are. But that's how we're socialised to create a gap. And creating this more equitable dynamic and relationship in this space, we just don't know what that looks like at a societal level, apart from the fact that previously up until now it's been disproportionately an experience felt by people in private school.

Gem: That makes a lot of sense.

Sophie:  Right? So my intention has always been to have a wider influence than what we do at The Cabin. My desire is that practices that we're working on here can filter to mainstream spaces because I think that that is ethical and I think that all children should experience their rights, not just the minority. And if the one thing that we can do to then empower all those people in mainstream school is to shift that relational dynamic so they see themselves as as much of a person as the adults in the space, then in terms of my theory of change that is right on it basically. People feeling more empowered and feeling their voice matters.

Gem: Yeah, I can so see if I look back across my life and how I was when I first started working for example, I still asked if I could go to the toilet. I just didn't know that I didn't have to ask permission for things or that I was able to just talk to people in authority as though they were humans. So I think that feels so powerful. And I guess...

Sophie:  Oh, sorry Gem. I'm so excited.

Gem: I know, me too. There are so many questions.

Sophie:  It's so juicy, but I mean, this is the thing... I was in a sixth form not that long ago. I was there to talk about politics and things with a group of students who are actually politics students. They're doing government politics at A Level. And this is a group of sixth formers, so they're aged 17 and 18. And right at the start, before we'd even started, one of the people in the room put their hand up and he asked if he could go to the toilet and the teacher said no. And I was just stood there being like, "What is happening right now? Like, is this for real?" And I looked at them both and I was just like, "What?" What relational agreement do you guys have? He's probably 18 years old. But the thing is, a lot of this has become so normal. It's just so normal, it just becomes part of the culture of that space in it. And until you step out of it and you start to think about it, you don't see it. It's like you're just blind I think, largely like I was. There's a lot of scope for progress, you know, small things like that. Those are the things that can be done right now in the mainstream system that will help without having to change anything at governmental level, without having to have big changes even, small things that can start to close this gap and start to increase people experiencing their rights.

Gem: What kinds of things would you suggest?

Sophie:  I would love to sit down with a headteacher and really help them look through the hidden curriculum in a way, not the things that are supposed to be being taught, but the things which are being taught by consequence of policies, let's say, or even the way the day's timetabled. It'd just be great to have a look through all of that and see where the opportunities are. Because I think there's a lot, for example, at The Cabin we have things being offered in the plan of the day where they're either run by one of the children, run by a facilitator or where the facilitator and a child together. These are more structured things like I was mentioning before, the planet session that I did the other day. Now most schools as far as I know, have activities which are not like curricular activities or they're kind of additional to the main curriculum that's being delivered, whether that's the lunchtime clubs or after school clubs, for example. Why not approach those spaces in that way? You could have some things being offered by teachers, some things being offered by students, some things being offered by students and teachers together. And then you're kind of like integrating a bit of a self-directed element into the school day with really not having to do very much apart from just to change the culture of those times. That's one thing that I think could be really fun to explore.

Gem:     Cool, and what about... So we talked about it really briefly before and we have talked about it in the past, the idea that not everyone can send their children to a self-directed space because obviously they don't exist everywhere. And in order to home educate your children, like in my personal circumstances, the children's dad works full time and I kind of squeeze my coaching and other work into any other space that I can get. I know you do the same. So there is in a way like there is an element of privilege that comes with having someone in the family that earns a full-time wage that is enough to be able to kind of survive. We're not millionaires, but equally we're kind of able to just keep afloat and so I guess it's like what do those people do who maybe couldn't afford to take their children out of school? I guess the way that they parent can be different can't it, if people aren't already parenting in a more consent-based way.

Sophie:  Yeah. This is a real problem. It's a real problem. There are so few spaces that are like The Cabin available right now in the UK - very, very few. There are some but the chances are that you don't live near one. That's much more likely than you living near a setting like The Cabin. And like you say... I mean the other thing is, which I think is really important is that when you opt out of the system so to speak, you make yourself more vulnerable as a family. And that is also more dangerous for some families than others. If you present as a white middle class family, you are safer when you're out and about in a town, in the daytime, during school time with your children, I would say, based on considering how racism and other things affect how people feel in public and how they experience their lives in relation to services and authorities. So I think that that's important to mention. And how class does make this in a way easier for some people than others, especially if they feel... even if it just comes down to a sense of self-confidence around being able to choose other than school. We need to be having conversation regularly about how this is an issue and how the social justice issues around being able to access something other than schooling. It's a big, big topic to explore. And in terms of how you can make it work, when it's not an option to opt out of school, I think you're right. There's ways that you can be in relationship with your children that increase the levels of respect. The main thing I would say is to think about honesty in the relationships. Because to me, where there is dishonesty between parents and children is a big red flag or it's an indicator to me that there isn't a mutually respectful relationship happening there. Because adult privilege means that adults can conceal and they can just lie to their kids. I don't know what to say. I don't know how to make it sound nice but it's a problem that we have where we don't have necessarily transparent and honest and authentic relationships between parents and children. And that would be what I would be encouraging people to explore, to reflect on the extent to which they feel authentic and honest in their relationship with their child. And you know, at the end of it as well, we can only be in a rights respecting relationship with our children in as much as we're in one with ourself. It's hard to just manufacture that if you're not actually living it in your own relationship with yourself and your own life. So a big part for me in being able to practice what I preach is constantly working the principles that I advocate for at The Cabin. I'm self-directing myself. I'm trying to use my own voice. I'm listening to myself. I'm being as authentic as I can. I'm living in the most consensual way in my relationships that I can. And I think that anything we want for our children... this is another interesting point... Whenever we find ourselves doing something to or for our children because we think it's best for them or going to make them into something that we think is good, whenever that happens, it's an invitation to actually stop and turn that mirror right on ourselves, because when we're treating children like a project of development and not first exploring that project in our own lived experience and in our own self, then it's another example of inequitable dynamic.

Gem: Yeah. And you talk a lot about people meeting their own needs as you, as you just have been, but I guess in society in general, we're not encouraged to meet our needs in any way. So we're constantly living outside of a state of having our needs met. And I think there's two things. So for me, one thing was realising that no one was going to come along, once I found out about unschooling and self-directed education, no one's going to come along and be like, "Oh, you can be this now. You've been working really hard your whole life and so I decided to gift you this promotion or to gift you this new career that you've always been wanting." And understanding that you just have to do the stuff that you want to do. So for example, I would not have trained to become a coach or I would not have started Queers & Co. if I hadn't realised that I didn't have to wait for someone's permission to actually do the things; that the knowledge was out there. I am very lucky that I'm in a position where I could use existing skills to go and research how to make a podcast or how to be a coach or those kinds of things. But the idea of going and getting things yourself or going and kind of choosing a project to work on, no matter how small and it can just be for yourself, for me it was revolutionary. Just understanding that I was actually even allowed to do that because I thought that learning stopped as soon as I left University and if I wasn't doing a course or I wasn't doing some kind of qualification, then there was no need for me to be working towards something or it didn't mean anything.

Sophie:  Yeah, totally. And this is De-schooling 101, right? School teaches us that we're only as legitimate as the person with perceived authority says we are. Right? That's it! We're only as good as someone's mark that they gave us says we are. And that's so not true. I mean, it's so subjective a lot of that anyway, and it's such a disempowering space to be in with our own concept of learning. And like, it's very distracting actually from the reality, which is that humans are learning all the time. You can't help it. Everywhere you are at all times, you are learning something. We look around us, we're observational creatures, we look around, we scan the room, we make decisions based on what we see. We're learning through experience all the time in all of our relationships and everywhere we are. And one of the unfortunate and maybe unintended consequences or at least side effects of traditional schooling is that we internalise the belief that the only legitimate learning happens within an institution that calls itself a school or a university or has constructed accreditation related to it and has created a hierarchy within it that makes us feel like it's legit. And I'm not saying that those spaces aren't necessarily useful. They are useful. It can be really useful to access something that is more structured or to connect with people that have got expertise on something and to choose into doing a course or developing our knowledge in a way that is within an environment like that, that's very purpose built. But that's an element of our overall learning experience, not the sum of it. And also, I think that for me, if I had to try to get to what I'm doing now through official channels, it wouldn't have been possible because there isn't a course that exists out there to teach me this stuff. It doesn't exist. And if I had felt that I wasn't legitimate or capable or didn't know enough to be doing what I do now, to identify as a childrens rights activist, to found a space like the one that we have based on my own research, based on my own capacity to learn and to acknowledge every time there's something I don't know that I have the personal authority to find the answer then we would be stuffed. We would be just stuck in the status quo. And I think that it requires us to de-school, let go of this idea that the only important or meaningful and true things that we can learn is something that happens in an institution and branch out, branch the fuck out. At The Cabin we talk about having a principle of ed positivity. And that's kind of a play on sex positivity where it's basically, if you're not hurting yourself, someone else or the environment then go for it. In terms of what you want to learn about, everything is potentially up for grabs. And we don't have a hierarchy where we say these subjects are the important ones and these ones are the hobbies. It's a very sort of trans-disciplinary approach, which actually a lot of universities and schools now are aspiring towards having a culture of interdisciplinary practice or trans-disciplinary practice because it's acknowledged that it reduces your blind spots. But all of us as individuals can live and learn in that way by not believing yourself to be only good at something and not good at something else. Or one set of knowledge is for you and other sets of knowledge are for someone else. And in practical terms, for me, what that's looked like is researching across disciplines to answer my questions. So it includes reading books about economics, reading books about psychology, reading books about history, reading feminist work, reading spiritual work. It's like across the board because it makes for a better solution. It makes progress. That's the creative way to go about doing things. And I would really encourage whoever is out there, if you have a problem or you're dealing with an issue or your job is to answer something, open up all your channels. And now with the internet, the gatekeeper's gone.

Gem: Yeah, yeah. Fuck the gatekeeper.

Sophie:  Yeah, fuck the gatekeeper. There is no gatekeeper. That was something that worked for a while. It doesn't work anymore. The internet has democratised information. You can access stuff. And do you know what else? If you can't access it for some reason, someone that you can contact can help you. Twitter is amazing. I have been helped to develop myself and to learn the things I need to know by being in relationship with other people and asking them, "Can you send me this document? I don't have access to it, do you?" "Yes I do. Here you are." Talk to other people. And that is also another element of de-schooling, moving out of an idea of scarcity and competitiveness with all the people who are interested in the same stuff as us.

Gem: Yeah, I was just going to say collaboration is a huge part of self-directing your education isn't it? As you say, reaching out to other people who might be in positions where they can access things that you don't have access to. And also thinking about how that works in a child-parent relationship. Quite often, one of the questions that I get asked when we're out and about and I say that my children are home ed, then people will say... Oh, and also I should mention they're home educated, not home-schooled because we don't replicate school at home... And people will say, "Oh do you teach them?" And I tend to just say, "Oh no, the children follow their interests." But what is really important is that you do not need to be a teacher or you don't need to have gone to university or have done any kind of specific education or training in order to home educate your children. The way that I see my role is as a facilitator to their learning. So my children ask a lot of big questions about philosophy or philosophical questions and all kinds of things and I don't know the answers. And so my job is not to say, "Well I think this" or "At school I was taught this." It's to say, "Oh, that's a great question. Let's go and find out the answer" and to facilitate them on that journey of exploration to find their own answers, which is then hopefully what they will continue to do as they grow up rather than you're getting input from a person who is an "expert" to impart them with knowledge.

Sophie:  You literally need two things to do this, right. Two things, curiosity and critical thinking. That's it. That's it. If you are engaging with curiosity and you're taking a critical approach, you're good.

Gem: Yeah. And maybe the internet too.

Sophie:  The internet helps but even without the internet people have been doing this before the internet even existed. We're so lucky now. I mean, you know, the internet makes this journey faster, broader, maybe more fun, more interesting in some ways. I don't know. It has limitations too in other ways. But it definitely helps with them building community. It definitely helps with organising and in terms of supporting people to find friends and to create opportunities together. If it wasn't for social media platforms, then you know, it would have been a lot more difficult and a lot more time-consuming to achieve, just from my own perspective, what I've been able to do over the last five years. The things that we've been able to create have happened in a very fast process because of being able to use the internet and social media.

Gem: Yeah. And I'm conscious of time, but I just wanted to bring in this idea of queering things. So I'm obsessed with queering things, as I know you are.

Sophie:  Yeah me too.

Gem: So the idea of being a queer person in the spaces instantly means for me I think, that I don't have to play by the social norms. I can choose to do things differently because I don't really feel part of mainstream society quite a lot of the time. So I'm just wondering how queering has come up for you in different spheres of your work and your life.

Sophie:  Yeah sure. You can totally describe this way of being as queer. It's queering from the norms for sure. And to me it's in alignment with a lot of queer theory. If you were going to create a queer ed system then it would look like this, that's my personal opinion. It's rooted in consent, it's open, you're negotiating boundaries, you're able to self-identify, it's very queer. You could say it's a queer space. I think for me personally, one of the things that was an indicator and a red flag for me early on in terms of wanting to find an alternative to school was around the fact that I think if it's what you were hinting at, I was feeling as my children were approaching school age, I was starting to feel worried about how in my parenting I try to create a culture of social justice in terms of being very open around sexuality and gender identity and all this kind of stuff, whether that was going to actually endanger my children in school because I thought, what if they go in and they're holding those views and they are rejected or bullied or it causes them to have problems? Or what if the teachers undermine those values and then they take that on board as being true? Theoretically that shouldn't happen. Legally it shouldn't happen. But especially schools that are often set around strict gender binaries for example, where you can only be a boy or girl and there's a boy/girl uniform and there's boy/girl toilets and all the rest of it. It was something I was worried about. So it was really important to me that the spaces in which my children were growing didn't reinforce any of these traditional issues around sexuality and gender and other things.

Gem: So we're coming towards the end of the time now and I just wondered, every episode I asked someone, what is it they recommend other people check out? And I wondered what it is that you might like to share?

Sophie:  Sure, so there's so much good stuff I'm enjoying at the moment. But I would just say that I have so much gratitude and respect for bell hooks and thanks to bell hooks' work, it's really given me so much insight into loads of things, definitions of love, ideas about what relationships look like if they're not patriarchal, just amazing. I just love her work. At the moment I'm working through Teaching to Transgress, which is brilliant and I would really, really recommend people check out that from bell hooks. Teaching to Transgress. It's on Audible and you can buy it as well.

Gem: Amazing. Thank you. I'll put it in the show notes.

Sophie:  Thanks.

Gem: Cool and is there anything else that you wanted to mention or include before we come to a close?

Sophie:  I just want to put out a recommendation for courage as well. Courage is so important and we don't talk about it enough. I feel like sometimes you have to just find that part of yourself inside that feels courageous and allow yourself to roll with it. This way of being and this way of living, and I'm sure this resonates with lots of your listeners because you know, queerness requires courage, right? Fundamentally, you can't even take that word unless you have some courage in your bones. So this is what I do when I'm starting to feel unsure or I'm feeling a bit just vulnerable or whatever, I just try and like find my way back to that word and just let myself sit with it for a bit and it gets me going again. So courage is my friend and they want to be your friend too.

Gem: That's amazing. Thank you. Thanks so much, Sophie.

Sophie:  Such a pleasure, Gem. You're awesome and these podcasts are great. So exciting. I love it. I can't wait to see what more's gonna come.

Gem: Oh, thank you. Thanks for being part of it.

Sophie:  Anytime. Bye.