‘Homeschooled’ recalls a formidable mother and a vexed education
When the novelist Stefan Merrill Block moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, at age 8, he struggled to fit in. “I try to call it ‘home,’” he recalls in his absorbing new memoir, “Homeschooled,” but “the word feels pasted on with a glue stick.” Soon, however, Plano — and specifically the shiny new McMansion where Block lived with his father, his brother and his volatile mother — would morph into a home so all-encompassing that he struggled to escape its confines. For five years, from fourth through eighth grade, Block was a victim of a 1987 Texas court ruling that legalized home schooling. Isolated from his peers and virtually abandoned by the adults who might have intervened, he moldered behind closed doors with only his unraveling mother for company.
Though Block wondered why his education received so little oversight even as he was enduring it, his memoir is less an indictment of home schooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular. Block makes brief note of the regulatory vacuum that allowed his predicament, but for the most part he writes with the phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist.
Before his mother sequestered him (his brother continued attending public school), he was a normal, if nerdy, fourth-grader who spent his days enmeshed in the low-stakes Machiavellian intrigues of elementary school. He discussed books with his crush, the horse enthusiast Tiffany; goofed off with his best friend, Noah; and drew charts mapping the popularity of each of the kids in his circle. Then, abruptly, he found himself at home, without any jocks to envy or crushes to pine for.
The solitude was agonizing, as was the boredom. What he missed most, Block recalls, was “the mysterious complexity that is Other Kids.” Without the distractions of social snafus and interpersonal dramas, the weeks bled together, forming “a sometimes scary quicksand” of tedium. In the end, Block writes, “the featurelessness of my days with Mom has become their main feature.”
In his desperation, Block took to writing stories “about lonely, bored children, spirited away to some adventure world by a magical leprechaun, a radioactive spill, or extreme meteorological phenomena,” many of them set in a town called Nowheresville. Indeed, writing stories and idly thumbing through comic books was most of what Block did during his interminable school days.
His mother’s unconventional methods were inspired by the anti-institutionalist crank John Holt, who amassed a cult following on the American fringes in the 1960s and ’70s by arguing that children should be allowed to choose their own curriculums. Holt’s theory of “unschooling” accorded perfectly with Block’s mother’s conviction that her son was a genius whose creativity had been quashed by the drudgery of public school. What unschooling amounted to in practice, however, was that Block was left largely to his own devices. For five years, he languished, watched sitcoms and snuck into online chatrooms. Anything counted as schoolwork in his mother’s eyes, provided that it could be transformed “into some kind of project that will impress her.”
But if Block’s mother was easily impressed, she was also easily irritated. She could be exuberant and playful, but her dark moods cast a long shadow over the household. To Block, she was “not only a parent” but an “entire childhood social sphere,” and she figures in the claustrophobic world of “Homeschooled” — and the equally claustrophobic world of Block’s youth — as a sometimes charismatic and frequently domineering eccentric who presided over the family with an iron fist. Some of her quirks were charming and harmless: She believed, for instance, that “people are capable of a mild form of photosynthesis.” But many of her odd theories were far from innocuous. She was so skeptical of “the medical industrial complex” that she refused to take Block to the doctor for ear pain until his ear drum burst, and she forced Block’s brother to gorge himself on Doritos, which she baselessly hypothesized might cure his sweet tooth.
Cruelest of all were her attempts to infantilize Block. In an effort to restore his hair to the pale blond shade of his infancy, she forced him to smother his head in hydrogen peroxide until it stung. “I spend a good part of each school day in her arms in the pool, as she quizzes me or just sings to me, my scalp tingling with the extracts and chemical agents,” he writes. When she became convinced that “there is a connection between an infant’s crawling phase and the development of fine motor control,” she made Block, then 12, crawl around the house in the hopes that it would improve his handwriting. Even when he escaped her clutches by demanding to go back to public school, excelling in high school and making it to the International Science and Engineering Fair, she followed him, arriving at his hotel unannounced.
It is fitting that “Homeschooled” is narrated in the present tense. Evidently, Block’s childhood memories are still possessed of a sharp immediacy. The past is never really over for someone subjected to such scarring humiliations during his formative years, and perhaps for this reason, Block succeeds at the near-impossible task of narrating from a child’s perspective without sounding like an adult in miniature. Indeed, the sections that treat his years in homeschool and his difficult adjustment to high school are more deft and fluid than the sections in which he looks back at his childhood from the vantage point of adulthood, when he sometimes lapses into sentimentality. At his mother’s funeral, for instance, he muses: “These are some of the only people Mom ever let inside the high walls of her life. … I only wish for her that she had let more people through those gates.”
Yet even when Block succumbs to his emotions, he manages to capture his frightening, formidable mother in all her ambivalent glory. Throughout, she is terrifying but strangely sympathetic. Her love for Block is scalding in its intensity, and she is tragic precisely because she is so eminently understandable. After Block’s own daughter, Stella, was born, he remembers thinking, “The hot weight of Stella in my hands gives me a terrible empathy for Mom, for her desperation to freeze time, or to rewind it.”
The most painful part of “Homeschooled” is that Block cannot bring himself to hate his mother — not when he is a child, and not when he is an adult who understands the gravity of her abuse. “Even if I sometimes feel like we’ve vanished from any sort of life at all,” Block writes, “Mom can still make that distant world seem capable of answering our every hope.” Even now, despite everything, she can.