Tara,

That's a very interesting point. I'm curious if you (or anyone else) can elaborate further.

Incidentally my value priorities for my kids are:
1. Ethical and decent human beings
2. Health
3. Able to function adequately in society
4. Academic development
5. Extra-curricular stuff

I really think point 3 largely takes care of itself in the course of normal life (there is stuff like driver�s ed, of course), and all normal parents attend to point 2, so I do tend to focus more on points 1 and 4. It is funny that most people would actually describe me as someone singularly focused on academics, when that is actually not my top priority.

I haven�t listed �happiness� as a goal, because I doubt you can really successfully pursue happiness as such. I suspect that you can try to lead a decent and worthwhile life, and, with a little bit of luck, a nice bonus will be happiness.

I mentioned on one of these threads how one of my kids really annoyed her cousin by telling the cousin that the cousin could not play piano because the cousin was not homeschooled. This of course was not only rude but false -- it was just a matter of which child happened to be taking piano lessons. (Incidentally, I know the cousin very well, and she is in fact extremely bright, quite possibly brighter than my kids. My kid�s not entitled to look down her nose in any way at all towards her cousin.)

However, the kids of most of the people on this board really will end up being greater achievers academically, in an objective sense, than most of their acquaintances, and all of us as parents, as shown by our participation here, put a pretty high value on academic achievement. The kids are inevitably going to pick up on this.

So, since we really do think it is good to be high achievers intellectually, how do we get our kids to understand the distinction between better academically and being better as a human being? Indeed, how do we get them to understand that you can and should rank human beings on particular skills (ice-skating, trumpet-playing, etc.), but, except in terms of basic moral behavior, it is generally wrong to rank human beings as human beings?

I hope my kids learned all of this a bit from the piano-insult incident: we had some long and detailed discussions after that, and my child did choose, without any suggestion from us, to later apologize to her cousin.

I also agree with you about being labeled as �smart and nothing else.� I really did feel that way as a child. I�ve mentioned somewhere that a classmate towards the end of my senior year casually said to me, �You know, Dave, you�re actually okay.� Clearly, she had heard I was a nerd (well, I was!); fortunately, we had gotten to know each other well enough that she came to see me not just as a nerd but as an ordinary guy.

By high school, I was mature enough to grin at this sort of thing, but as a younger child it did bother me.

Can you elaborate on how this works in your local homeschooling group? I know of some kids in ours who are clearly gifted, but the general ethos in the group tends to push them to hide the fact. Again, I�m not sure how to create a situation where everyone can say �Hey, I�m great at basketball, you�re great at calculus, and Emily can really make that trumpet sing!� and everyone can feel that this is wonderful.

Maybe it is an impossible dream.

All the best,

Dave