Anyone can homeschool -- but should they?

Homeschooling -- really unschooling -- was lonely, claustrophobic and boring, writes Stefan Block in Homeschooled, a memoir of his fifth- through eighth-grade years at home with a mentally ill mother.

Convinced her son was a genius, his mother pulled him out of public school, writes Becca Rothstein in a Washington Post review of Homeschooled. There was no instruction. Block wrote stories about adventurous books, read comic books, watched TV and visited online chat rooms.

"Cruelest of all were her attempts to infantilize Block," writes Rothstein. "In an effort to restore his hair to the pale blond shade of his infancy, she forced him to smother his head in hydrogen peroxide until it stung." When he was 12, she became convinced that “there is a connection between an infant’s crawling phase and the development of fine motor control,” he recalls. She made him crawl around the house for months to improve his handwriting.

When he was allowed to go to high school, Block discovered he was way behind academically.

The homeschool community is pushing back, calling the book “hit job on homeschooling," writes Larissa Phillips, a former homeschooler who is "homeschool cautious," she writes in The Free Press. "I unequivocally support every parent’s right to take their children out of school and educate them at home. But we need to acknowledge the risks, and possibly establish a set of standards, to ensure the best outcomes."

Block's book isn't the first troubling memoir, she notes. Eight years, Tara Westover's Educated became a bestseller. Westover grew up at the family junkyard in rural Idaho in a large family headed by a brilliant, but mentally ill father. She managed to educate herself -- with great difficulty. "Dark stories like these confirm the popular narrative: that homeschooled kids are isolated losers from strange, cultish families, that they’re undereducated and unsocialized, and that homeschooling is general malpractice on the part of the parents," writes Phillips.

Most homeschoolers aren't crazy -- or incompetent. Many sign their children up for sports, music, arts and other activities where they socialize with other children.

But "homeschooling is fraught with challenges and even mishaps," writes Phillips, who describes what worked and didn't work for her children.

The number of homeschooled children has from increased from an estimated 3 percent of the total to six or seven percent since 2020, she writes. The "growth rate now appears to be stable."

Online, any conversation about public schools' problems inspires someone to say, “Time to homeschool!," she writes "It's often followed with the insistence that 'Anyone can homeschool.' Do you work full-time? Did you hate school, and flunk math? Don’t worry! Countless advocates are ready to reassure you: “If you can read, you can homeschool!”

It's not that simple, writes Phillips.