Child Prodigies and Unschooling

April 14, 2010 · Filed under Unschooling · Tagged Unschooling

Have you ever noticed that people always approve of homeschooling for child prodigies? Tell someone, anyone, that there’s a child who doesn’t go to school but who breathes calculus, or dances eight hours a day, or is building a robot that can cure cancer, and that person will applaud vigorously and say, “Wow, what a kid; he certainly doesn’t need school.”

But, as many of us know, tell someone, anyone, that there’s a child—your child, in fact—who doesn’t go to school but who sometimes reads all day, and sometimes watches television all day, and sometimes just kind of sits around and thinks all day, and that person is very likely to say, “Well, shouldn’t she be in school?”

Being a child prodigy validates unschooling for people because it places unschooling in a realm they can understand: the realm of competition. If a child is “the best” at something, suddenly the way that child spends her day isn’t so important anymore. A child who is not flagrantly superior, however, needs to stay with the other sheep-children and devote herself to becoming a good citizen-consumer. That’s the way I see it.

And I don’t like it.

Unschooling allows every child to be the best at being herself. It provides room for a child to pursue her uniqueness and to learn incessantly without sacrificing it. A child who can do that is indeed a “marvelous example” (the definition of a prodigy).

By the way, the girl with the goat on her head at the top of this post is my favorite image of an unschooled child: free, happy, and flagrantly off the beaten path. Now that’s what I call a child prodigy.