Homeschooled
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A heartbreaking and empowering debut memoir about a mother’s all-consuming love, a son’s perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like him
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author Stefan Merrill Block gives us an intimate look at his family life and education in this fascinating, sometimes shocking memoir. Not long after the practice was legalized in Texas, Block spent five years being homeschooled by his emotionally unstable mother. Her teaching methods (which included playing trivia games in the pool and crawling on the ground to improve his penmanship) were more self-serving than effective. With agonizing detail, he shares just how out of step he was with his classmates when he eventually returned to traditional learning for high school. But what engrossed us as much as these unputdownably strange memories is the empathy that the adult Block has for his mother, who he now understands was very unmoored. He fittingly narrates this deeply personal tale himself, ensuring that this masterful blend of humor and pathos is never lost. Homeschooled is an insightful account of a profoundly complex relationship between mother and son.
Customer Reviews
Relatable yet Fresh
I thought about Tara Westover’s Educated a lot while reading this. Homeschooled is not nearly as dark though. I especially liked his telling of his mother’s story up to the end. The humanity in it all was fantastic, no one martyr no one villain. Just how hurt and unhealthy people can destroy a part (or a whole of a part) of one’s life.