If you were sincerely convinced one of your children was the next Leonardo da Vinci, more obviously gifted in childhood than Benjamin Franklin or William Shakespeare at the same age, you might feel some extra pressure to provide them an education perfectly suited to their needs and abilities.

You might sense that your most important job was simply to keep your child's brilliance from being dimmed by the kind of school that worked fine for other lesser kids.

And maybe you decide the only way to do that would be to keep them out of school altogether.

From KERA in Dallas, this is

think. I'm Chris Boyd. Writer Stefan Merrill Block spent five years as a nominal homeschooler, starting

in fourth grade, when his adoring, often unhappy, always unorthodox mom became convinced

no public school could be worthy of him. I say nominal because aside from

making him study math, his mother allowed him to otherwise make all his own decisions about what

kind of learning to pursue. He worried from the start about losing ground compared to his former

classmates. Often he was just lonely trying to learn on his own. But in addition to hearing how bad school might be for someone with the extraordinary talents his mother saw in him,

he also sensed how lost she seemed to feel when he was away from her.

It made for a complicated existence that Block has been unpacking ever since.

His memoir about all this is titled Homestchooled. Stefan, welcome to

think. Thank you so much for having me. It's so great to be back. How did your mom decide to

pull you out of school in fourth grade? We had moved from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas,

when I was eight. And back in Indianapolis, she had had a full social life. She had a pretty

exciting job. And she lost those things when we moved here. And I think that she felt like

she was looking for a place to put her energy and to put her days. I was a little bit unhappy

at my public school, but I could see how my unhappiness with my school

really appealed to her, it spoke to her.

And I sort of performed my unhappiness for her.

And it became a sort of school became a kind of common enemy that was bringing us together.

...