On not comparing children

When we first decided to homeschool, I wandered around on a hundred and one homeschooling and unschooling blogs, hungry for descriptions of people's daily lives. It was great to read so many personal anecdotes, but I also felt many a twinge of anxiety, because everyone's kids seemed so gifted. They had these areas of expertise-- some made amazing art or played instruments, some were learning chemistry at age 9, some were experts in lizards or insects or small electrical appliances.

Because of my own years of schooling, I would inevitably start to compare my kids and their imagined future to these homeschooled kids. Would Anya get so interested in ancient Egypt that she'd know the names of the pharaohs and their pyramids in another year? Would she learn HTML code by age 10? Would she start cooking meals at age 8? Would she start writing her own skits and filming them before age 12?

This tendency to compare has dissipated almost entirely. "My child can't do all that!" is no longer a lament, it is simply a neutral fact. No child can learn everything. You can't be an Egyptologist, a cook, a painter, a pianist, a speaker of Mandarin, a math guru, a computer geek, a prolific writer, a voracious reader, a botanist, a chemist, and an astronomer. Some of these things, but not all. Once that sinks in, what other people's kids are doing becomes interesting... but moot, in terms of assessing your own child's learning.

I was once at the public library and this very competitive mom asked my daughter, out of the blue, if she could read yet and whether she could spell her last name. I related this galling tale to another unschooling mom I know, and she had this excellent comeback: "I would've asked her kid if he knew how the komodo dragon immobilizes its prey!"

Schools have to teach "the basics" to all children, and give them no opportunity to develop their own intellectual interests, in order to continue to rank them. You have to spend all your time on math and reading and certain basic facts (Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria; igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary; scalene, isosceles, equilateral). Otherwise you cannot create competition, you cannot classify, you cannot grade, you cannot rank. We have to be able to peg kids on the same narrow spectrum, to know who's successful and who isn't.

In unschooling, and much of homeschooling (even if a curriculum is used for part of the day), kids learn all sorts of other material. Imagine if two unschooling moms could be implanted with the cutthroat competitiveness of many a yuppie academic parent-- what would the conversation look like?



Mom 1: Little Tommy spent last week studying Monet. We're going to take him to Chicago for that big impressionism exhibit.

Mom 2: Oh, really? Well, Susie has been so interested in amphibians and their sensitivity to environmental degradation... we're doing the frog survey this spring.

Mom 1: Oh, isn't that nice. And Tommy's been so interested in electricity and magnetism, I think we're going to spend Saturday at the science museum....

Mom 2: Of course, Susie's other love is geometry. We just can't get our hands on enough math manipulatives to keep her happy!


They might try to compete, but they'd wind up talking past each other. Two actual yuppie academic moms are more likely to announce their child's reading lexile [a metric used in the Open Source reading program] or their percentile on the last standardized math exam. Competition is bound to be rampant when there are only two primary metrics: reading and math scores. Any other intellectual interest is "extracurricular" and qualifies as a hobby, not as academics.

Competition usually involves reducing people to a set of numbers, but the reverse is also true: reducing people to numbers breeds competition. We're all socialized to compare, without even meaning to. If someone tells you their weight, their income, the price of their home, their SAT or GRE score, you're immediately aware of whether the figure is higher or lower than your own, even if you don' t really care.

Why do parents put up with this dehumanizing practice in schools? And how do they stand the simmering-under-the-surface competition?