Contrary To NYT, Homeschooling Is Still Better Than Public School

A man ought to have a really, really good reason to write a New York Times piece trashing his dead mother. Stefan Merrill Block did not, but he went ahead anyway, with a piece headlined “Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right.”

Block opened dramatically: “By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.” To demonstrate this, he informed readers that his mother “had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blond of its baby color.” Also, after “reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.”

That’s it? Bleached hair is harmless and might even have been trendy at the time. Having a 12-year-old crawl to improve fine motor control is nutty, but Block does not share how long she tried this, which would be an important bit of information to give readers. Regardless, as crazy educational ideas go, it’s still less insane than trying to teach kids to read without phonics, which the education establishment has been doing for decades. 

And that is the necessary context and contrast. Homeschooling can go wrong. Government-run schools constantly go wrong, from sexual abuse to abject academic failure to ideological insanity (of which gender ideology is only the latest, most loony expression). And despite Democrat claims to prioritize education, the very worst schools tend to be in solid blue cities and states. While he acknowledges that abuse at schools does happen, Block wants to use the few years he was homeschooled to attack homeschooling as a whole, and he does not spend much time addressing the alternatives.

Parents have good reasons to want to keep their kids out of government-run schools. Here in Virginia, the Loudoun County school district notoriously covered up a rape that was ideologically inconvenient. Just before the start of this school year, a Loudoun elementary school teacher was arrested for soliciting a minor. And the school board is being sued over their policy allowing students to use wrong-sex facilities like locker rooms and for punishing kids who object.

This is only a small sample of the litany of public school misconduct and incompetence. But mistrust of government schools, though often merited, is not the only reason parents choose to homeschool. Block himself seems to realize this. Indeed, his parents sent his brother to public school. They obviously weren’t totally “anti-school,” or anti-public school, his mother just thought little Stefan was a poor fit. And she was probably right. He seems, by his own telling, to have been one of those awkward children. As he recounted, “after just a day or two at a Boy Scout camp, I’d actively tried to contract conjunctivitis so that I could be sent home early.” It’s hard to blame his parents for concluding that he would fare poorly in public school. Indeed, if they had sent him to school for those years, would he now be writing about how his mother sent him off to be miserable and bullied?

It is easy to believe that he spent some school years being unhappy and lonely. It is hard to believe that attending a public middle school or junior high would have fixed that, let alone that it would have stopped problems such as “the long AOL Instant Messenger romance I carried on with a supposed teenage girl, who in fact turned out to be an older sexual predator.” He does say his mom had to take on part-time work at a certain point, and as a result, he spent many afternoons in his room. But does he really think that those hours spent alone would have been that much better if they had begun after school let out? Notably, Block did not write that life improved much, or at all, when he stopped homeschooling. 

He did indicate that he used to be more positive about his homeschooling years. Now, however, Block seems to have made those few years into an identity — the memoir he is selling is titled Homeschooled — and a scapegoat for his unhappy entry into adolescence. And he has turned this personal bitterness into a cause (complete with membership in the anti-homeschooling “Coalition for Responsible Home Education”). He whined that, “It was the lack of state oversight or standards that allowed our situation. It was the laws that failed me. Today, as home-schooling numbers continue to surge, similar laws fail to protect millions of kids.” But millions of kids don’t need to be protected from homeschooling; They’re doing great.

Block grudgingly conceded that homeschooling often works very well, admitting that homeschool advocates “point to a multitude of home-school successes under current laws, and certainly there are a great many.” 

Homeschooling is varied in purpose, method, and duration. Some families are dedicated to parent-taught curriculum all the way through high school, others use co-op approaches part of the time, or only homeschool for a few years. Some try it and realize that it isn’t for them. The whole point of homeschooling is that it is not the one-size-fits all, factory-style approach to educating children favored by public (and many private) schools. There are homeschool field trip groups and sports teams, and so on — the endeavor has certainly expanded since the ’90s, when Block said his mom pulled him out of school.

The teaching quality is often better in homeschooling as well. Some homeschooling parents are more credentialed than anyone teaching at the local public schools. And for those who aren’t, well, it doesn’t take a degree (prestigious or otherwise) to teach a 5-year-old phonics — indeed, it was educators with more degrees than sense who stopped teaching kids phonics. 

Broad attacks on homeschooling just don’t hold up, especially in light of the often-dismal alternatives. Thus, after throwing a lot of shade at homeschooling in general, Block insisted that he just wants some modest, common-sense reforms to ensure that homeschool kids are learning and not being abused. Why, he asks, are homeschooling advocates so resistant to a bit of oversight? Wouldn’t they want to show off how well their approach works? 

The answer to this was helpfully, if inadvertently, provided by Block himself. After linking to some cases of genuine abuse by homeschooling parents, he then offered additional thoughts on what might constitute child abuse. As he put it, “Legal definitions of abuse vary, but the choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive. I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to limit a child’s access to learning materials, or to indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives, or to willingly limit a child’s ability to function in a larger society.”

Ah.

As this shows, it’s bad faith all the way down. Block claims he wants minor or seemingly necessary oversight to protect homeschool children from abuse — and even admits “most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children.” But he reveals a vague and expansive (and therefore easily manipulated) definition of abuse. For example, what does it mean to “indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives”— would that encompass teaching a child that, say, Christianity is true, and other religions are not? What does limiting “a child’s ability to function in a larger society” even mean? Does that mean not teaching them basic literacy, or not letting them use social media?

Block claims to just want to protect children from abuse and neglect, but his nebulous ideas of what that means would put all homeschoolers at risk of being unjustly targeted by government officials. Homeschoolers would be fools to agree to more regulation on such terms, especially when the regulations are being pushed by a man who, after “years of therapy,” decided that his homeschooling mother was to blame for his unhappy adolescence, and who then shared his mommy issues with the world for attention and profit.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All” (Ignatius, 2025).