Why School Feels Disconnected for So Many Children and Teachers—And How to Fix It
How Indigenous History and Somatic Learning Offer a Framework for Rebuilding How Children Experience School.
When I speak with educators, I begin in a place most teacher preparation programs rarely take them: the body.
Before we talk about curriculum or classrooms, I ask adults to notice their breathing, their posture and the way their nervous systems respond to stress. Why? Because learning is just as physical as it is mental, and a child’s ability to focus or participate often depends on whether they feel safe in their body.
Through Liberated Learning, an organization I founded to support schools and families, I help educators build classrooms around that understanding.
This approach, embodied in what we call the Lighthouse Learning Model, draws from Indigenous traditions and ancestral ways of learning in relationship with land, kinship and collective belonging.
Rather than starting with tests and mandates, the model asks four questions educators seldom hear: How are people connected to one another? How does the body participate in learning? How are we practicing repair when harm arises? And how does the learning serve the larger community?
To understand why those questions matter for educators, it helps to look at the origins of the school system most of us inherited.
In the late 19th century, federal policy sent Indigenous children to distant boarding schools designed to remove them from their families and communities.Their hair was cut, their languages were suppressed and their identities were reshaped in service of a colonial agenda.
Students spent part of each day on reading, writing and arithmetic, and the rest on manual labor divided by gender. The system aimed to reshape children into workers who fit the social order of the time. Culture, kinship and identity were treated as obstacles to be removed.
This history sits at the root of the public school model we inherited. Today, children still spend long hours away from their families in highly regulated environments. Schedules are standardized, movement is restricted and language is monitored. Many students learn early which parts of themselves feel acceptable in the classroom and which are expected to remain quiet.
The effects surface in everyday moments: a child reprimanded for speaking Spanish, a student disciplined for emotional expression, a curriculum that overlooks the histories of the communities it serves. Over time, the message accumulates: belonging is conditional.
The Lighthouse Learning Model offers another path. It guides educators toward practices grounded in interdependence, emotional attunement and shared responsibility. Families, elders and community members become part of the learning ecosystem. Restoration takes precedence over punishment and relationship anchors the work.
These practices draw from Indigenous traditions that have long understood education as a collective process where knowledge lives in community, and healing and learning move together.
Schools shape how children understand themselves and their relationships to others. When belonging anchors the learning environment, curiosity and confidence grow with it.
Telling the truth about the origins of our system gives us the clarity to build something more humane. That process begins with remembering, repairing and learning together.
In this video, Dahlia traces the roots of modern U.S. public education to Indigenous boarding schools designed to erase culture, language and identity. She connects this history to ongoing harms in contemporary classrooms and shares how The Lighthouse Learning Model seeks to reclaim Indigenous ways of knowing, restore relational learning and invite educators and communities into a process of deep unlearning and remembering.
Book: Rising Voices: Writings of Young Native Americans by Arlene Hirschfelder and Beverly R Singer
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