Though its popularity is growing, only a small percentage of Americans have personally experienced homeschooling. In his debut memoir, Homeschooled, novelist Stefan Merrill Block (The Storm at the Door, Oliver Loving) offers a glimpse into one boy’s unusual encounter with that process, but at its heart, it’s a revealing and deeply empathetic portrait of a complex relationship between mother and son.
At age 8, Block moved from Indianapolis to the rapidly growing Dallas suburb of Plano, a place he calls “an almost perfect nowhere.” In fourth grade, his complaints that his school “seems to be a kind of factory for the processing of our young brains” combined with his mother’s skepticism that her gifted son was thriving in that environment prompted her to embark on their homeschooling project, only recently legal in Texas.
There was little official oversight of what might loosely be called Stefan’s curriculum. Apart from some morning math instruction and occasional visits to area museums, when he was not eating lunch at a favorite restaurant, playing a trivia game while lounging in the backyard swimming pool or accompanying his mother on errands, Stefan was left unfettered to pursue his own interests. These mostly involved voracious reading and writing, with the dawning realization that “I can pretty much do anything I please with the day, as long as I eventually turn it into some kind of project that will impress her, which is always simple enough.”
Read our interview with Stefan Merrill Block, author of ‘Homeschooled.’
But as he reveals in this tender, sometimes painful, account, there’s a darker story—some of it situated in his mother’s own childhood and some of it arising from her sense of dislocation in an alien environment far from her New England roots and her former Midwest home—that lies at the core of her obsession with maintaining their arrangement. At last, it falls to Stefan to recognize, with heartbreaking clarity, the danger that the situation would become permanent and to summon the courage to end it.
However idiosyncratic Block’s mother’s tutelage may have been in his five years of homeschooling, it’s undeniable that he emerged having learned some enduring lessons about the surpassing power of grace, forgiveness and love more valuable than ones to be found in any textbook.
