Homeschooled: A Memoir by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” With no background in education and no formal training, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims. She forced him to bleach his hair and to crawl like a baby in a strange and regressive attempt to recapture his early years.
Long before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s all-consuming love.
Review: Thank you to Goodreads giveaways and Hanover Square Press for an ARC of this book, which is out now.
First of all, let me say that I don't think it's very fair of me to give a memoir two stars, but here we are.
Block describes his story in very sincere and well-written terms. This is the story of the nuanced love from a parent that can sometimes protect and sometimes confine a child. He is honest about his story, which is truly at heart the story about his complicated relationship with his mom.
In the author's case, his mother was exceedingly controlling and projected her own wishes and desires onto him. He was pulled from school to be "homeschooled," which essentially meant he read books and swam in the family pool all day. His mother felt like he was the child most like her and that his genius was best served through free expression and exploration. Meanwhile, his brother was allowed to remain enrolled in traditional school. I wondered why their father did not intercede or at least ask more questions, but it seems as if everyone was intent on keeping the mom happy.
His mother seems to have been deeply resentful of him growing up and more independent from her, which manifested in weird ways and things she asked him to do, like talk and crawl like a baby at times. She seems to have been very mentally unwell with great rage and to have deep-seated conspiracy type theories on many subjects: "She believes that ear shape is secretly one of the m ost important determinants of whether someone will succeed in life, and someday I'll need surgery on my own" (6)
I guess I was expecting more from this story. There just didn't seem to be that much of a story here. I was largely bored by this, but perhaps I went in with the wrong expectations or expecting a much darker story than this was, which isn't truly fair. My rating is ultimately based on how little I enjoyed reading this. It was a short book, but it took me seemingly ages to make it through it.
A note that a lot of people are seemingly angry about the title choice for this book, which seems to cast aspersions on the whole homeschooling movement as a hole. While I don't think this is a great title for this text; that takeaway seems unfair and unwarranted. This is his experience with being homeschooled. He never suggests nor does the book at all suggest that all homeschooling is bad or as unstructured and hapless as what he experienced.
I switched back and forth between the physical and audiobook. The audiobook was read by the author, which is usually great with memoirs to add another personal level of detail. But his voice was just ok.
Stars: 2
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