Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, 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 increasingly erratic theories and whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son’s early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.
Years 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 largely unseen space. 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 insatiable love.