An empowering memoir that will inspire you to advocate for yourself and the ones you love the most.
Educational Disobedience is an anguished tale of a mother’s love and determination in the face of tremendous heartbreak, ignorance, and discrimination. Dr Annise Mabry’s story begins generations earlier with her grandparents, a family navigating a landscape of rampant injustice in 1940s Georgia. Mabry’s grandfather valued learning and refused to remain passive while others endured educational deprivation. This legacy is realized when the author, a mother of two, endures the heartbreak of a public education system failing her children. Mabry is candid about the effects her crumbling marriage, deteriorating physical health, and busy career have on her kids and their educations. Frequent themes include frustration, overwhelm, anger, disillusionment, the flawed system, a lack of support, and being dismissed by peers or those in a position to help. But rather than succumb to these negative influences and let her children become statistics, Mabry takes matters into her own hands and blazes a new path. She removes her children from public school and follows a homeschool curriculum, providing a safer environment for their emotional and academic growth. After Mabry experiments with numerous online resources that don’t address her individual needs, she reshapes the traditional homeschooling model to fit her household’s circumstances. This establishes the framework for the Tiers Free Academy Homeschool Cooperative, an organization that provides a pathway to earning a diploma.
Besides being a motivating force, Dr. Annise Mabry is an engaging storyteller. The narrative opens with her grandparents’ breathless escape from threatening adversaries. Their courage and resilience lay the unshakable foundation for the author’s indomitable spirit and passion for success. From highs and lows in her career to amazing connections with friends and neighbors in the community, this heartening memoir is engaging enough to get audiences personally invested in the entire journey. Families weighing similar pros and cons will feel an instant kinship as the author works through the harsh realities of homeschooling. Even with a background in education, could she devote enough time? How hard would it be to stay on track? And what about a diploma? Despite some unique family challenges and common stigmas surrounding homeschooled kids, Mabry not only took on this responsibility but expanded her success into over 1000 victories. The latter half of the book is filled with touching personal expressions from some of these graduates, a feature that allows the entire memoir to come emotionally full circle. If you’re on the fence about homeschooling, everything in this book offers food for thought. Whether you’re facing systemic inequities or have just been dealt a bad hand in life, Educational Disobedience: A Mom Who Became A Movement is an empowering memoir that will inspire you to advocate for yourself and the ones you love the most.
