Contrary To The New York Times, Homeschooling Is Still A Much Better Alternative To Public SchoolsBy: Nathanael Blake
December 19, 2025
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.
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?
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/19/contrary-to-the-new-york-times-homeschooling-is-still-a-much-better-alternative-to-public-schools/
