Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him out of school. It was the early 1990s and the family had recently moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, where Block’s father had started a new job. While Block and his older brother, Aaron, had been wrenched away from their schoolmates, their mother had left behind work, a social life and her best friend, and found herself isolated and rudderless. But then she discovered a new purpose: taking charge of her son’s education.
Homeschooled reveals how Block ended up spending five years deprived of the company of his peers (including Aaron, who continued going to school) and at the mercy of his mother’s unpredictable moods. She had decided school was stifling her younger son’s creativity and that mainstream education wasn’t right for a boy of his sensitivities.
At first, young Stefan goes along with her scheme. “Whenever Mom gets one of her ideas, it’s hard to talk her down,” he reflects. “If anything, she just pities you for your ignorance.” But in that first year, she ignores the school curriculum and scales back their learning sessions to short maths exercises; in the afternoons her son is left to read comics, watch Oprah and write stories about a lonely boy who lives in a town called Nowheresville (Block is now a novelist).
Any sense that his mother – whose name we never learn – is genuine in her desire to give him the best possible education is dispelled as they begin spending days at the mall or searching for the cheapest possible lunch (french onion soup at $1.50 a cup). When Block wonders out loud if he is learning enough facts, his mother buys him the educational game Brain Quest, telling him to study the questions and answers which, she says, were probably lifted from standardised tests for fourth graders across the country. Slowly it dawns on her son that the reason he is home has little to do with nurturing his creativity, or the iniquities of formal education. “Mom just needs me all to herself,” he concludes.
double quotation markWhat seems like a case of maternal smothering morphs into something more alarming
Homeschooled, then, isn’t just the story of an unorthodox education – although Block is suitably withering about a state system that allowed him to go off-radar for five years without once checking in. It is a compelling and fitfully harrowing child’s-eye account of a mother’s unravelling. What at first seems like a case of maternal smothering morphs into something more alarming as Block’s mother insists they conduct lessons outside in the midday Texas heat. It turns out that she is hoping the sun will bleach her son’s hair to the pale blond shade it was when he was a toddler – never mind that his skin is getting scorched. When that fails, she brings home bottles of a bleaching agent that burns his scalp.
Telling a story from the perspective of a child while providing adult insight can be a tricky balancing act, but Block pulls it off, recounting events with his novelist’s eye for detail. And while he captures the loneliness and stultifying boredom of life stuck at home, he is never boring. His tone veers between coolly dispassionate, as he solemnly accepts his mother’s authority, and wary and confused as he tries to navigate the ever-changing weather of her moods. That he writes in the present tense gives the story a nightmarish immediacy.
When his mother decides that it would be beneficial to both her sons’ handwriting skills if they were to revert to crawling around the house as they did when they were babies, Homeschooled moves into the realms of psychological horror, with shades of Mommy Dearest, Misery and an undercurrent of Tara Westover’s Educated. Little wonder that when Block watches the news about the Waco siege in 1993, during which the FBI raid a religious group’s compound, he compares his life to that of the Branch Davidians. “Some day the authorities will come and declare this strange closed-off life of ours illegal, and Mom will either have to turn me over or burn us to the ground.”
There is a niggling question, not fully answered here, about what Block’s father is doing throughout all this. We know he fitfully comes home from work for lunch, at which point mother and son make a show of having been knuckling down all morning. We also learn how Block’s dad takes him to taekwondo classes, donning the robes and joining in to assuage his wife’s fear that something terrible will happen to their son without a parental presence. All of which suggests an inclination to appease rather than challenge her crackpot theories.
Stefan with his mother. Composite: Stefan Merrill Block
When Block finally returns to school in ninth grade – in the face of fierce opposition from his mother – it is with a hunger to learn, though his lack of socialisation is instantly apparent to his jeering fellow students. Academically, he is also years behind, with humiliating gaps in his knowledge – he recalls thinking the American civil war was so-called because citizens “exhibited remarkably good etiquette” – but shows impressive tenacity in catching up, studying around the clock to ensure a route out of Texas and escape from his mother’s overbearing influence.
Given all that Block endured, you wouldn’t blame him if this book were a straightforward hit job on a monstrous mother, albeit delivered posthumously (she died of cancer during the pandemic). In fact, the final few chapters find him digging into her past and unearthing the root causes of her neuroses, which appear to be connected to an assault and parental abandonment. If there is a simmering grief at what happened in his formative years, Block never allows it to bubble over and at no point does he express hatred for his tormentor.
When he has a daughter of his own, he is surprised to find himself feeling “empathy for Mom, for her desperation to freeze time, or to rewind it”. Homeschooled paints a bleak account of a derailed childhood, but it isn’t a revenge story. It’s about a child failed by both his parents, a neglectful education system and the long, hard road to normality.
Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block is published by Wilton Square (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
