Moore takes them on a field trip to FAO Schwarz. She is an authority figure, but the real 'power' can be seen as coming from the people who "can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven." Thus, it is not Miss Moore who holds the real power over Sylvia and her friends, who live in a much poorer neighborhood. Rather, it is society and those who are wealthier. Here, the method of education is indirect and positive; Miss Moore teaches the children through experience and open-ended questioning. In a sense, by the end of the story Sylvia gains some semblance of power through what she learns from the trip.

On the other hand, the mother in "Girl" preaches to her daughter about how to 'do this' and why she should 'do that', adding in the occasional negative comment about how her daughter is becoming a "slut" and "the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread." As Kincaid states in an interview with Allan Vorda, the mother is the "self-possessed" authority figure:

"I've come to see that I've worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to...a relationship between the powerful and the powerless. The girl is powerless and the mother is powerful. The mother shows her how to be in the world, but at the back of her mind she thinks she will never get it. She's deeply skeptical that this child could ever grow up to be a self-possessed woman and in the end she reveals her skepticism."

Unlike Miss Moore, who believes in the children's ability to learn complex issues like socioeconomic inequality, the mother in Kincaid's story has less confidence in her daughter's abilities. Her instructions are for simple, hands-on activities like washing clothes and setting the table. There are very few times when the level of thinking goes deeper, but when it does, it involves how others will view the daughter rather than her ability to learn complex issues. Unlike Sylvia, the daughter does not gain any power by the end of the story. Though the reader can imagine that she will learn at least some of the tasks set by her mother, she has no voice and is not shown to have progressed as a character.

For further study, you can take a deeper look at how Sylvia's character has more in common with the mother in "Girl" (i.e. negativity and name-calling). Additionally, you can compare how societal expectations are navigated in each story (e.g. how Sylvia and her friends are viewed by the other FAO Schwarz shoppers vs. how the mother warns the daughter of how to interact with "wharf-rat boys" and "the baker").

Note: the quotes from both stories - as well as the passage from Kincaid's interview - come from The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, edited by Ann Charters and published by Bedford/St. Martin's.

In "The Lesson," a black female authority (a teacher) tries to instruct her class and, particularly, a stubborn and resistant adolescent girl, about the nature of racial and class oppression. Everything about Miss Moore irritates Sylvia because it disrupts the overly confident little girl's understanding of the world and her awareness of how to cope with what she knows.

"Girl" is a story in which a black female authority--the speaker who is Girl's mother--instructs an adolescent girl on how to behave and how to exist within predefined social constructs. The first key difference between the stories is that Sylvia resists Miss Moore's lesson, though she has undeniably understood it, while the Girl listens passively. The reader never finds out what the Girl has absorbed, and this seems to matter less anyway than the speaker's incessant instructions. Another key is that Miss Moore teaches the lesson with the hope that the children will understand and gradually begin to question the oppression that they did not know existed. She hopes that they will take what they've perceived as normalcy and see it for the unfair construct it actually is. On the other hand, the speaker in "Girl" expects her daughter to follow the rules of her social construct. Though this amounts to complicity with one's oppression, it's unlikely that the speaker would see it that way. What she wants is to ensure her daughter's survival within the world that they know.