Educating the Unique Child

Abstract

Whether they understand children as innocent people-in-development or as already agentic, autonomous people, the parents interviewed for this study almost universally talked about their children as unique. This chapter examines this ideology of the unique child, arguing that this has taken hold as one of the dominant ideologies of childhood in the United States. Examining how homeschooling parents utilize this discourse of unique children demonstrates the ways in which this ideology leads parents to prioritize their own children’s needs over the needs of other children. The author demonstrates that parents talk about homeschooling as a practice that allows them to tailor children’s education to their unique temperaments, aptitudes, interests, and other needs, and furthermore, that it does this in a way that is just not feasible in public school classrooms.