The other day I was at a doctor's appointment with Pinkie Pie. (Routine, everything is fine.) The two doctors we were seeing were ones we had never talked to before, and they were trying to make small talk with Pinkie Pie. Of course they asked the one thing everyone asks a kid - what grade are you in? That she is being homeschooled came up, and they seized on that. They started asking about university entrance exams for homeschooled kids (I don't know much about it, to be honest) and made it clear that the really important thing about homeschooling was getting good grades on said exams... even though none of us even knew if said exams existed.
They also talked about how wonderful homeschooling was because you can apply to university years early and get started on your career faster. I tried to explain that going to university at age fifteen wasn't for everyone, but they were off, chatting to each other about how great it was that she was being homeschooled so she could skip tons of grades and get working sooner.
It doesn't surprise me that a couple of doctors would see it this way. Their world mostly consists of overachievers who put an uncommon amount of time and energy into their careers. For them, going to university early would have been fine, from a academic perspective at least.
But from my perspective people have forty years to do the career thing, and only a handful of years to do the teenager thing. Rushing to the working world is fine if that is what the teenager in question really wants, but pushing it onto them, or assuming that this is obviously the thing you should do, is a destructive error. They will have so long to grind away in a job - let them grow into it organically, no need to force the issue.
What is particularly frustrating though is how they projected their worldview and experiences onto my kid. They didn't think "Well, there are a ton of reasons for homeschooling, maybe I should ask what the reason is." They immediate leaped to the assumption that I am homeschooling with the purpose of giving my brilliant, overachieving child a head start on her career. If they had asked I might have said that homeschooling is because I want to teach from the Bible, or because fuck the system man, or because school isn't working for her, and those are completely different situations than they are imagining.
Also my kid, while fairly clever, isn't by any means overachieving.
Doctors making all kinds of silly assumptions doesn't affect me directly. These guys assumed that everyone is in the top 5% of humanity academically, and don't notice the fact that this isn't possible, but people assume plenty of things more ridiculous than that.
But it bothers me that they don't seem to notice how it will affect kids in their care. 12 year olds aren't stupid, and when you make it clear that your standard of normal far exceeds their capabilities they notice. When you lead off with the assumption that this kid finds school trivial, that academics are effortless, and that marks on exams are the important thing, you leave kids who struggle in school, get low grades, and do poorly on exams feeling even worse than they already do. Kids that have trouble in these ways are sent the message that they suck constantly and they don't need more of it from their physicians.
A lot of the world struggles mightily with the structures we have in place to measure, control, and evaluate each other. Just because *you* fit nicely into those structures doesn't mean everyone does. Those doctors surely would have agreed that some kids really have trouble in school, but they never bothered to think that the kid they are treating might well be one of those, and just assumed that she was just like them instead.
I want the world to be a place where a lot more people spend a lot more time thinking "What if this person in front of me is someone who finds this thing hard, even if *I* find it easy?"
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