When his mother decides he’s too gifted for public school and says she’ll be homeschooling him for fifth grade, Stefan Block has a dark sense of what’s coming. “Mom sometimes gets ideas which aren’t like other people’s,” he notes uneasily in his recent memoir Homeschooled, writing from the perspective of his child self, even though he’s 44 now, and his mother is dead.
He’s right to worry. In addition to generally neglecting his education, his mother insists that 13-year-old Block revert to crawling on all fours instead of walking upright, saying that this will restart his developmental process and improve his atrocious handwriting. “Mom doesn’t let me stand the rest of the day, and when I wake in the morning she’s upset to find me walking down from my bedroom,” Block writes. He crawls for the next several months, to the point that he gets rug burns on his knees and has body aches so painful it’s difficult to sleep. When he repeatedly suggests returning to school, his mother implies this would leave her alone and miserable, her eyes sometimes filling with tears at the thought.
This is not the first memoir that lays bare a dysfunctional family’s homeschooling journey. Block’s memoir joins Tara Westover’s Educated, which made a splash eight years ago. Westover, who grew up in rural Idaho with devout parents who didn’t trust the government, turned 18 having gleaned all the math she could from a single battered textbook and never having heard of the Holocaust. Dark stories like these confirm the popular narrative: that homeschooled kids are isolated losers from strange, cultish families, that they’re undereducated and unsocialized, and that homeschooling is general malpractice on the part of the parents.
