Equal Opportunity Through Individual Instruction

Education is a great equalizer when it expands what people can do, not when it makes people alike. Children are not equal in their interests, their present understanding or the things they hope to pursue. Everybody knows this when they talk about their own child. Yet we can suddenly forget it when defending a system that gives the whole room the same explanation and calls the uniformity evidence of fairness.

The moral concern is that each child deserves a serious opportunity. The practical question is what that opportunity requires for this person, which will not always be the same thing it requires for the person beside them. One needs time with an idea the group has passed; another needs work beyond what the group is ready to attempt. An identical provision can leave both poorly served while allowing the institution to describe its treatment as equal.

Money cannot settle that contradiction by itself. Spending can buy valuable expertise, resources and attention, but the expenditure is not the capability those things are meant to develop. We have to ask what changes in the education and how the child benefits. An argument that begins and ends with how much the system costs has confused the effort the institution consumes with the opportunity the learner receives.

The same confusion appears in aggregate results. An average can help describe a system, but no child gets to possess the class average as their understanding. They have to read the particular passage or make sense of the particular relationship in front of them. A public commitment to equality should make us unwilling to lose that person inside the comparison, especially when the respectable aggregate conceals a persistent individual failure.

A child's goals introduce another kind of difference, because opportunity is not exhausted by access to the minimum. If somebody wants to become exceptionally good at a field, they need room to pursue it seriously. Equal concern cannot mean preventing that pursuit until everyone has reached the same point. Otherwise we have quietly made the suppression of a strength part of our answer to someone else's need, without improving the help available to either.

The case for individual excellence asks us to separate equal dignity from identical destinations. A society of more capable people will contain more kinds of capability, with different depths and different contributions. That is a richer prospect than producing a uniform record of minimum achievement. The point of expanding human potential is to let more people realize it in ways that could not all have been prescribed in advance.

Homeschooling gives families authority to respond to these differences without first persuading a whole system to reorganize. You can take a difficulty seriously, use an interest to give the work meaning and let readiness change the pace. The responsibility is still to provide a coherent education. The difference is that coherence can be built around one learner's development, rather than defined as keeping every learner on the same page.

We should ask the equalizer argument to make good on its promise. More access, better teaching and more room for excellence are all defensible ways to enlarge opportunity. Making every child's education look the same is defensible only where it actually serves that outcome. When sameness becomes the reason a child cannot receive what they need, equality has become a defense of the arrangement instead of a claim on behalf of the person.