A compelling and fitfully harrowing child’s-eye account of a mother’s unravelling
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tefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him out of school. It was the early 1990s and the family had recently moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, where Block’s father had started a new job. While Block and his older brother, Aaron, had been wrenched away from their schoolmates, their mother had left behind work, a social life and her best friend, and found herself isolated and rudderless. But then she discovered a new purpose: taking charge of her son’s education.
Homeschooled reveals how Block ended up spending five years deprived of the company of his peers (including Aaron, who continued going to school) and at the mercy of his mother’s unpredictable moods. She had decided school was stifling her younger son’s creativity and that mainstream education wasn’t right for a boy of his sensitivities.
At first, young Stefan goes along with her scheme. “Whenever Mom gets one of her ideas, it’s hard to talk her down,” he reflects. “If anything, she just pities you for your ignorance.” But in that first year, she ignores the school curriculum and scales back their learning sessions to short maths exercises; in the afternoons her son is left to read comics, watch Oprah and write stories about a lonely boy who lives in a town called Nowheresville (Block is now a novelist).
