Weeks 4 & 5 2024-2025 in Review
Hi TCC Families,
Thank you for your patience with us - we'll be combining weeks four and five in review into one!
Heading into this past week, we were both exhausted and full of joy from the weekend's back-to-back days of engaging with literally hundreds of people at Tower Grove Pride, inviting them into our shared space with Complete Harmony to connect and create and just…be. Thank you to so many of you for joining in that space with us and welcoming folks into this collaborative experience.
At our table, we displayed many of the books that inform our work with young people. We placed front and center Akilah S. Richards' Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work and Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, edited by carla joy bergman.
So many passersby paused at the cover of Trust Kids! They walked to our table, took the book in their hands, and turned the pages and ideas over. We asked folks, "What struck you about this book that you stopped by to take a closer look?" Many shared that the idea of trusting kids is both radical and necessary.
"It's not something we really do - but it's something kids deserve.
All of us were kids once."
We're always thinking here about trust and what it really means, both philosophically and practically. We had been discussing trust in community before our time at TGP, and it's even more topical now. The young people talk about it often here, as well, among themselves, and with us. We consider the relationship trust has to consent, and to coercion. Adults' coercing, micromanaging, and powering-over children is the dominant culture's default setting. Trusting them and treating them as already whole people is the exception. In our recent discussions about values - er, vitals - here, a young person suggested that "without trust, nothing else (that we do) would be possible." We agree. Self-directing our learning in community cannot actually happen without trust. Another young person added that if the kids don't trust the adults in the space not to coerce or force them to do things, then they won't feel the spaciousness they need to explore their curiosities. They may not even know what they're curious about.
From the foreword to Trust Kids by Matt Hern: "The idea of trust is highly unstable, malleable, and permeable: it looks very different through different eyes…Why should we trust kids? Why is that an imperative worthy of so much thoughtful writing? Who is not trusting kids now? And honestly, do I trust other adults? Should I?
I started floundering some.
But then I thought of a better question: why should anyone trust me?"
What makes any of us adults trustworthy - in action, not just in thought and good intentions?
Do the children in our lives trust us to see and treat them as already whole people? Why or why not? We can ask them. How do they answer?
We'll leave you with some other snippets about trust that guide us, starting with Teacher Tom's recent piece The Radical Idea of Treating Children Like People, and questions that carry us. He shares, "I've discovered that if I am to do right by children I must release control, shut up and listen, get out of their way, and love them. And whenever I'm challenged, whenever things are not going well, I've discovered that the answer always lies in returning to the radical idea of treating children like people."
What does it mean to trust? What conditions must be necessary to trust children - about who they are as people, about who they know themselves to be (and what are all of the conditions that must be present in order for us to remain whole and connected to ourselves)? About the paths they want to carve for themselves? About how and with whom they choose to spend their time? John Holt, who wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn, says: “To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted." What do you think?
These past two weeks here children have chosen to spend their time in various ways, opting into (and out of) myriad offerings & gatherings: making and reading zines, writing poetry, creating blackout poetry; playing improv games; choosing big topics to learn about via the "In a Nutshell" YouTube channel; narrowing down the vitals important to our community; pick-up hangman, baseball, and video gaming; budgetary planning; and then lots of in-between - reading in hammocks, handling sticks, intentional play, writing songs, internet searching, self-chosen project planning, exploring the grounds of "Neighbor Dave's," holding chickens, playing D&D, walking, listening to birdsong, staring at the fall sky. When children choose these ways of being, do we critique them - assessing that to our eyes they are doing "nothing"? Or are we open to trusting that they're guided by an innate knowing, a trust in themselves, that all humans possess when we're given time and space to return to ourselves? That learning and meaning-making are happening all the time, every second - whether we can see it or not?
Whatever they're doing, it's exactly what they need to be doing in that moment. We're reminded of Teacher Tom's piece above:
"This is the children's project, not yours."
We'll leave you with an incantation on trust from adrienne maree brown's Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry:
trust the people
trust the people who move towards you and already feel like home.
trust the people to let you rest.
trust the people to do everything better than you could have imagined.
trust the people and they become trustworthy.
trust that the people are doing their work to trust themselves.
trust that each breach of trust can deepen trust or clarify boundaries.
trust the people who revel in pleasure after hard work.
trust the people who let children teach/remind us how to emote, be still, and laugh.
trust the people who see and hold your heart.
trust the people who listen to the whales.
trust the people and you will become trustworthy.
trust the people and show them your love.
trust the people.
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With gratitude, care, and trust,
Emily, Sarah, and Zoey