Man recalls early ‘Wild West’ days of being homeschooled in Texas

Nine-year-old Stefan Merrill Block hated his new school in Plano, Texas. It was boring, stifling. His homeroom teacher shook him by the shoulders in front of all his classmates when he asked too many questions one day. He even started a novel about a boy who escapes from school. He would come home and sulk for hours, until his distracted mother noticed and took him in his arms: which was his main aim. 

Yet, he was stunned one day in 1990 when his parents set him down and his mom presented him with an article about “homeschooling.”

“It’s school, but at home . . . a perfect solution,” she said to him. “I can rescue the creative streak of the next Charles Dickens here before that school quashes it completely.”

Block, now 43, would spend the next five years under his mother’s erratic tutelage. He details it all in his astonishing memoir, “Homeschooled” (Jan. 6, Hanover Square Press).

When he finally entered high school in ninth grade, he was woefully unprepared: a social outcast and a dummy who first report card was dismal. He had spent the previous five years “pursuing his passions” — as his mother liked to say — mainly reading paperbacks by the pool and spending hours by himself in his room.

Block’s mother had always been eccentric. She didn’t believe in traditional medicine or schooling and thought, writes Block, that “white people are capable of a mild form of photosynthesis” and that “ear shape is secretly one of the most important determinants of whether someone will succeed in life.”

After his father, a psychologist, moved the family from Indianapolis to Plano, she became angry and distant. She spent her days in the house drinking wine, talking long-distance on the phone for hours and stomping around the house.

So when her little boy complained about school, she grasped a solution that she felt would cure her listlessness — and repair their relationship.

Her teaching style was unorthodox. The two did math together at the dining room table every morning, but, after that, the day was devoted to “two general activities,” writes Block: a project he chose and did alone in his room, and “errands” with his mother. These could include bargain-hunting at TJ Maxx, catching a double feature at the cinema or working on their tans outside.

Sometimes if Stefan complained enough about not learning anything, his mother tested his trivia knowledge in their swimming pool, dunking his head into the water when he got an answer wrong.

Little Stefan only occasionally saw other kids. He signed up for Tae Kwon Do, but his father accompanied him, because his mother worried “about me alone in that ‘violent’ class.” He also joined a Little League team, but his mom urged his father to coach. The one friend he had left from his elementary school stopped coming over.

Along with being a personal story, “Homeschooled” is also a window into the Wild West of the homeschooling system in America and an indictment of it.

When Block left his public elementary in 1990, Texas had only recently made homeschooling legal, thanks to a burgeoning fundamentalist Christian community who lobbied legislators for the right to educate their children outside of the supposedly corrupting influence of secular public schools. 

But Block writes that homeschooling was barely regulated. In Texas, “a parent didn’t need a high school degree to homeschool; actually, a parent could be a convicted felon, could be under investigation by Child Protective Services and still be within legal rights to ‘homeschool’ as they saw fit, without the threat of inspectors or social workers coming to check on the child’s education or welfare.” (That’s still the case: Texas is one of the most lenient states for homeschooling.)

Block argues that homeschooling robs children of their agency, and gives them little recourse if things are going really wrong, Because “to confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parent but also your entire childhood social sphere.”

He himself eventually crawled back up to academic standards, winning science fairs and becoming editor of his high school paper. Yet, it took him decades to untangle himself from his mother’s needy gaze and to shed the loneliness he felt those five years trapped in the house with her. 

She was “my only teacher, friend, world entire,” he writes.

He decided distance was the best solution. He went to college in St. Louis, Mo., and did all sorts of things that would make her reject him: He gained weight, drank beer, painted his nails, even wished he was gay, because he couldn’t cut the cord himself. But she never would let go. He moved to New York City, and eventually published two novels. When his mom suggested she move closer so she could help Stefan and his wife with their new baby, he demurred. 

“I’m sorry. I wish you weren’t the light of my life, but I just can’t help it that you are so wonderful,” she said. “You’ve always been the whole reason for everything, like it or not.”

She eventually died in 2020 from lung cancer.

In the aftermath of her death, Block obsessively reflected on their complicated relationship, and how she made him believe that he could do anything, no matter how delusional.

“Her love might have become the cage where I was raised, but it had also been the key to get myself out,” he writes.