"In the early 1990s, when Stefan Merrill Block was in fourth grade, he began complaining to his mom about his new school, with its pointless rules and mean teachers. He, his parents, and his brother had recently moved to the Dallas suburb of Plano from Indianapolis, and Block, a perceptive and sensitive child, could tell that his mother was unhappy in their new home, too. Together, they made a "lovely picnic" of their anger, as he describes it in his new memoir, Homeschooled."
"Under his mother's warped version of homeschooling, Block was largely left to pursue his own "interests," which included reading novels, drawing comics, and watching Oprah. In Block's telling, his father, a busy psychologist, mostly turned a blind eye to these aimless afternoons. As days of unstructured exploration stretched out before him, Block writes, he realized that "the longer I stay here, the further I will fall behind, and the harder it will be ever to go back.""
In the early 1990s a fourth-grade boy moved with his family to Plano and perceived his mother's unhappiness. His mother withdrew him from public school and made him the sole focus of an unstructured homeschooling routine, leaving him days of reading, drawing, and television. The father, a busy psychologist, largely ignored the arrangement. Over time the boy recognized academic falling behind and returned to formal schooling in ninth grade with C-to-F grades and severe gaps in knowledge. He then cut sleep drastically and pushed himself into a near-psychotic state to catch up. Homeschooling rates have since grown to about 3 percent of school-age children.
Read at The Atlantic
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