My father used to quiz us at the kitchen table, my older brother and me, during dinner. Geography and civics, science and religion, plus whatever general knowledge he thought needful—our own nightly game of Jeopardy!, with a whiteboard beside the table on which he tracked our scores. Win or lose, it was at this same worn table that next morning my brother and I would sit down to crack the workbooks for our classes. We were homeschooled.
Our put-upon mother, who had shepherded us through most of grade school, was back at work by then. My brother and I were both in our early teens, independent, and would plow in more or less companionable silence through our assigned reading and solve algebraic equations and then hand in our tests and worksheets to our father for grading. He gave us our marks in the evening, after another workday spent hauling his blue-padded chiropractic table to the homes of patients in the Orlando suburbs—adjusting out-of-whack spines; probing, for a modest fee, manifold subluxations and the mysteries of stuck joints, soft-tissue injuries, scoliosis.
I can still see him heading out in the mornings while I ate cereal at that same small table: wearing a starched dress shirt punctiliously tucked into his Dockers, the extra fabric pinched and folded flat at the sides in the neat military fashion he had acquired in the Air Force; a man dedicated, serious, self-made; a man who believed in autodidacticism, who could be found of a night, long after his high-strung wife had gone to bed, poring over medical textbooks. I can still see him sitting on the Berber carpet of our living room with the books around him, highlighting here and there a choice passage or using a ruler to guide him as he underlined a few words, his pen lines perfectly horizontal, as though rendered by a machine. Straight A’s were expected, not celebrated.
Compared to my mother’s warm, passional instruction, learning under my father was more rote, but it was also the beginning of greater independence. True, he pitched in on certain projects, such as when he helped us build out of clay a colorful scale model of a human cell, complete with mitochondria, ribosomes, and smooth endoplasmic reticulum. Yet because I wanted to learn things that my father had neither time nor qualifications to teach, he later enrolled me and my brother in a school for homeschoolers, where each Wednesday classes were held with teachers in real classrooms, in which we could flirt and fraternize with fellow students who, like us, wore piqué polo shirts with the school crest branded over their hearts.
Homework was assigned for the rest of the week and returned the following Wednesday, when tests were administered. For self-starters like me it worked out fine. Except that there were no extracurriculars, no student clubs, no student newspaper, no field trips; no sport or debate teams; no Model UN or school library. All my life I have tended toward isolation. I am not sure it didn’t start in those formative years, despite the friendships I made. If so, it was a slow poison. A lack that I tell myself I hardly felt at the time—you can’t miss what you never had—has widened and deepened with the years, like an alpine crevasse concealed under sifted snow. Which feels shameful to admit. Long ago I should have put away childish things. Only we never quite do, do we? A foundation can be forgotten only when it has been firmly laid.
The question of foundations (intellectual, social, personal) is central to possibly the most interesting book I know about homeschooling, Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai. The narrator, Sibylla, is an American single mother in England raising an extraordinary son. She is an odd bird herself, a bright logophile whom we meet half-bluffing her way through a research scholarship at Oxford; the sort of gal who finds comfort in a Hebrew grammar book. We come to know her through brilliant musings as much as through her actions, all of which are set down in manic bursts, as though typed in tearing haste, with an ampersand in place of each “and.” Sibylla in fact works from home as a typist, for £5.50 an hour, and both her paid labors and her personal narrative are constantly interrupted by the queries of her bookish, insatiable son. (“L wants to know what βίηφιν means. I say he knows perfectly well what it means & he says he doesn’t.”)
DeWitt’s novel charms by interweaving relatable human situations—a mother coping with her toddler’s tantrums, say, or struggling to pay bills as a broke freelancer—with the abstruse knowledge passed from a polyglot to her hyperlexic son. Ludovic—think ludic, “showing spontaneous playfulness”—Ludo or L for short, is shaping up to be a monster of erudition: English reading at two, Homer in Greek at four, with other languages living and dead shortly to follow; conversant before kindergarten with the Torah and the Arabian Nights (in Hebrew and Arabic, respectively), plus a farrago of animal facts, Jack London novels, travel writings, and general knowledge that he has hoovered up. When they visit museums, Ludo wanders into the staff-only areas. She takes to calling him jinsai, Japanese for “manmade calamity”—“obviously an indispensable euphemism for small child.”
Homeschooling for my parents had a religious aspect. Not so for Sibylla. It is neither a refuge from a hostile secular culture nor a way of investing her son’s education with the sort of purpose that the reformer Horace Mann once recommended (unavailingly) for American public schools: to guide students “outward in goodwill toward men, and upward in reverence to God.” At first she has no intention of homeschooling Ludo past preschool age. Indeed, the novel is not really about homeschooling; it is far too capacious for that. Knowledge and its limits, the need for roots, the burdens we heap on our children and the burdens they heap on us—these are its themes. But the note of skepticism toward traditional schooling is sounded early and often. “The business of getting a baby from womb to air is pretty well understood. . . . Presently its talents come into the open; they are hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility.”
There is a very funny sequence in which Sibylla enrolls Ludo, age six, in the local school. While Ludo—who, after paging through a biography of John Stuart Mill, has gotten it into his head that he is far behind his peers, since Mill started on Greek when he was three (“By the time he was seven he had read the whole of Herodotus,” our boy wonder frets)—while Ludo is pumping the teacher for information about the syllabus, worrying that he should have read Isocrates’s Ad Demonicum already, or Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, or any number of ancient texts, the clueless teacher drips with platitudes about children developing at different rates and how important it is for them to be at the same level as others in their age group. She is a creature of the system, a midwit enforcer of norms. With an eye on the lowest common denominator, she assures Ludo that Victorians like Mill “placed a much greater value on facts for their own sake than we do. Now we’re more interested in what someone can do with what they know.”
Ludo lasts five miserable weeks before Sibylla pulls him out. “If I ever have a son,” Ludo writes in his diary, “and he wants to leave school I will let him because I will remember what it is like.” My own father had so hated his Cincinnati public school—bullying on the bus, boring classes which bludgeoned his talents into insensibility—that he chronically underperformed; only upon taking an aptitude test to enlist in the Air Force did he discover he was smart. He wanted to save his children from suffering a similar hell.
Just as generals are always preparing to fight the last war, parents are always ready to prevent in their children’s lives the defects of their own childhoods. Overqualified, stressed-out Sibylla—who grew up in a series of one-motel towns before absconding to Oxford on the strength of a bogus transcript and forged recommendation letters, and who believes that “to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness”—is no exception.
So broken is the American public education system that to say it is broken is now clichéd. But a few bleak facts will ground us. In 2023, a mere half of fourth-graders were reading at grade level. Only 56 percent were performing at grade level in mathematics. Across all elementary-school grades, in fact, there has been since 2019 an 11- to 14-point drop in the percentages of students who meet math standards. Reading scores have declined by scarcely less appalling figures. As for middle-schoolers, their poor performance has hardly changed in recent years: In grades six through eight, no more than 49 percent of students were reading at grade level in either 2019 or 2023. Whatever harm the pandemic may have wrought, disastrous educational outcomes were part of the status quo ante.
Which is not to say that the COVID-19 shutdowns—promoted and prolonged by teachers unions—were not the equivalent of a neutron bomb. On all kinds of metrics, kids have yet to recover. In the 2022–23 academic year, more than one in four students were chronically absent, up from 13 percent in 2019–20. What meager reading comprehension the average high-schooler possessed pre-pandemic has evanesced. Phone-addicted freshmen now arrive at college having never been assigned a full book to read. Anecdotal reports suggest that countless students, unable to hack it in higher ed, are relying on AI tools to paper over their shortcomings. That is, to cheat.
This despite a decades-long rise in K–12 spending. American public schools now spend annually a total of $857.2 billion, or $17,280 per pupil, an inflation-adjusted increase of 192 percent since the 1970s. Yet rather than commit seppuku in shame at the shocking results they have overseen, the radical activists, busybodies, and bureaucrats for whom public education has become a make-work program demand endlessly more taxpayer funds. Ludo grasps instantly the perverse incentives at play: “No wonder Miss Lewis doesn’t know anything because we have to go whether she knows anything or not.”
Like a flock of blunt-bodied starlings bullying bluebirds from their nests, federal bureaucrats and school administrators alike intrude on family life. (Between 2000, when DeWitt’s novel was published, and the fall of 2022, administrative staff at public schools swelled by 95 percent, the ranks of principals and assistant principals by 39 percent. By contrast, the number of teachers grew by a meager 10 percent, while student enrollment increased a mere five percent.) Conservatives are right to decry such outrages as teachers’ imposing radical gender ideology on their credulous pupils, cultivating racial animus in the classroom, and socially transitioning young girls and boys without their parents’ knowledge, much less consent. Widespread grade inflation, which keeps parents in the dark about their children’s true academic progress, brings its own harms. And yes, K–12 education today is short on the Great Books, long on liberal homilies, lacking in Latin, and all but godless. Nietzsche savaged the German schools of his time as engaged in “brutally train[ing] a vast crowd of young men, in the smallest amount of time possible, to become useful and exploitable servants of the state.” The crowd is now coed, but is mass education appreciably different today?
Like Sibylla, my mother was overqualified. Far from fitting the stereotype of a granola-crunching hippie or religiously addled know-nothing, she holds a master’s degree in sociolinguistics from Georgetown. (She is however an echt evangelical, her prayers and supplications as incessant as a Cypriot’s twiddling of worry beads.) She was less world-wounded in those days, and I remember with what zest she set a couple of towheads their lessons. On the shelves sat her Norton anthologies of English and world literature and her hardback Signet Classic Shakespeare as reminders of the culture she had acquired, mute testaments that in my teenage years began to disclose their secrets: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” Eliot’s The Waste Land. In the psychic freedom of independent discovery, absent the theoretical brambles that might otherwise have hedged them round, their visionary light burned all the brighter.
In grade school I was part of a homeschool pod. The parents running it were all women, mostly mothers with plump, well-meaning faces who gathered at each other’s houses, tots in tow, for group lessons and recreation. (The latter meant a bunch of kids jumping on a big backyard trampoline with no safety net, games of HORSE played on a driveway hoop, guerrilla Nerf-gun warfare, freewheeling games of tag, and whatever else got our little limbs windmilling in the Florida heat.) Our mothers had lesson plans; they took turns teaching from mail-ordered coursebooks. As in a standard classroom, some kids distinguished themselves more than others. Homeschoolers are not necessarily gifted students. Intelligence is a rare bloom in all seasons and in any soil. Still, homeschooling is a prodigy’s paradise. Or should be.
Lone Ludo has no pod, no peers to measure himself against, only his own ongoing growth, like the tick marks a mother makes on a wall as her child weedily sprouts. Sibylla, constant gardener, observes her son’s mushrooming enthusiasms with a mixture of pride, exasperation, and concern. At five, he is too young to be watching The Seven Samurai, but her “uncleless boy” lacks for male role models; noble Kambei, lethal Kyūzō, buffoonish Kikuchiyo, and their fellow ronin will fill the void. Ludo wants to learn Japanese, but he is prone to starting things he doesn’t finish. So his mother makes him a deal:
I: Well if you read the Odyssey and Books 1–8 of the Metamorphoses and the whole Kalilah wa Dimnah and 30 of the Thousand and One Nights and I Samuel and the Book of Jonah and learn the cantillation and if you do 10 chapters in Algebra Made Easy then I will teach you as much as I can.
L: Then that’s what I’ll do.
I: All right.
L: I will.
I: Fine.
L: You’ll see.
I: I know.
“I have no idea how you would make a 3-year-old do this if he did not want to,” Sibylla insists early on, “any more than I know how you could stop one that wants to.” Ludo comes from a line of prodigies. His mother finds his language acquisition “not such a big deal”; in addition to Latin and Greek, she is at least partially fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish, and Bengali. Her father, a committed atheist, “skipped grades the way other boys skip class,” earning a full scholarship to Harvard at fifteen, only to have his preacher father kibosh his dreams. Nature, then, prepares the ground, even if nurture sows the seeds and waters the soil. Or doesn’t.
Ludo’s insatiable thirst for knowledge is far from disinterested. The tragic engine of his learning, it transpires, is yearning: yearning to know a father he has never met, who was never told of his existence and whose name his mother refuses to disclose. All Ludo knows is that his father is a travel writer (the worst he’s ever read, as it turns out). Consequently he spends years tearing through books by Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiessen, and other globetrotters, hunting for traces of kinship, all the while girding his loins for a father-son wilderness adventure, learning survival tactics and whatever languages he believes might come in handy.
Ludo, who from age five alternates with Sibylla as the novel’s narrating “I,” fits to a T the definition of a polymath in Johannes von Wowern’s 1603 treatise on the subject. Displaying “knowledge of diverse things,” he is capable of “wandering freely and with unbridled speed through all the fields of the disciplines.” Which raises the question: What does a fictional boy genius have to do with real-world education? In the 2016 afterword to her novel, DeWitt sets up Ludo as a rebuke to a system that fails to challenge and inspire: “Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not—only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.”
An oddity! A boy who can do Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms and who has memorized the periodic table and is fluent in every language into which his middlebrow father’s books have been translated—this boy could be considered something of a standout, yes. But then so is Elon Musk, who taught himself to code as a kid and later learned rocket science out of borrowed textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. So is Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense-technology startup Anduril, who as a homeschooled teen in Long Beach, California, invented the Oculus Rift, the first commercially viable virtual-reality headset. (He later sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion.) A demon wind drives the ingenious autodidact. More often than not, it whirls him miles from his point of origin, as the genie in the Arabian Nights bears Aladdin magically away to the Maghreb. America is a land that still lionizes the polymath. It is fitting that Sibylla is not British, but an American abroad.
Just how low society’s expectations are becomes clear when Ludo finally confronts his father, who turns out to be a colossal disappointment—a complacent, self-satisfied man in late middle age, unhandsome, given to mawkish sentiment, his books full of unsavory sexual episodes and specious profundity. His other children, in whom he takes little interest, are nothing special. Rather than read the Iliad, they watched Sesame Street. Nurture, it would seem, plays a leading role after all.
So disheartened is Ludo by his fakakta father, whose notional erudition is no match for his own, that he declines even to confess their relation. “If we fought with real swords,” thinks DeWitt’s hero, echoing a line from The Seven Samurai, “I would kill him.”
To be educated at home was once a mark of status. Peter Burke’s cultural history The Polymath offers multiple examples of upper-class prodigies—especially women, who were often excluded from university in Renaissance Europe—taught at home by handpicked tutors. Not quite as precocious as Ludo, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the illegitimate daughter of a Venetian nobleman, started on Greek and Latin at the ripe old age of seven. She also picked up Hebrew and French and Spanish, the latter fluently enough by her early twenties that she translated the Carthusian monk Giovanni Laspergio’s devotional writings into Italian. By all accounts she wowed the scholars who trooped in and out of her padre’s palazzo to instruct her in languages ancient and modern, in mathematics, physics, philosophy, theology, music. Later, to earn her doctorate in theology, she elucidated Latin passages of Aristotle before a donnish crowd at Padua Cathedral. They knew how to confer academic honors in those days: Cornaro was crowned with a laurel wreath; an ermine mozzetta was draped around her shoulders. A Benedictine oblate since her teens, she split her remaining time (she died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight) between further learning and ministering to the poor.
The arc of history has at times a horseshoe bend; the past Cornaro represents may be prologue. Recently, the technologist Antonio García Martínez predicted that schooling would soon “return to the aristocratic tutor era,” updated by artificial intelligence: “a humanoid bot teaching your kid three languages at age 6, and walking them through advanced topics per child interest (and utterly ignoring cookie-cutter mass curricula).” Calling the notion “magnificent,” he added: “Would have killed for this when I was a kid.”
Think of it: The banausic lessons, the necessary economies of teaching a roomful of children of varying aptitudes could be dispensed with. This is Sibylla’s preference, as eleven-year-old Ludo informs another boy: “He asked where I went to school. I said I didn’t go to a school. . . . I said my mother thought I should identify a field of particular interest and just go straight to university, though I would probably find the students rather immature.”
A field of particular interest. Yes. I entered high school the year The Last Samurai was published. Though my father never read it, he was in accord with Sibylla’s principles: Instead of Spanish or French he let me take two years of Latin, and later sent away to The Teaching Company (now called The Great Courses) for video-lecture series on Dante’s Divine Comedy and Joyce’s Ulysses. I’d picked out the courses myself. I wrote papers for them and handed them in, and each time my father forced me to defend orally the arguments I made. DeWitt refers in passing to “the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school).” If I didn’t hate school it was largely because I was allowed to read things that were marvelous—because they were marvelous. When I reached the closing affirmation of Joyce’s novel, “Yes I said yes I will Yes,” and when I beheld the vision in Dante’s poem of l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, I was not yet eighteen.
Why homeschool? In a profile of Palmer Luckey, Tablet magazine reports that his mother “believed all kids are different, and that no schooling system can devise a personalized education for every individual, who by definition is unique. In her son’s case, at least, the decision was vindicated.” Gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes have nothing on this sort of bespoke tuition. During his short stint in school, Ludo proves “a disruptive element in the class. [The teacher] said there were other things in life besides academic achievement and that often children who had been force-fed at an early age had trouble adjusting to their peers and were often socially maladjusted all their lives.” This, transparently, is cope. To be maladjusted for an ordinary life leaves open the possibility of being well adjusted for an extraordinary one. For brilliant oddballs to be cut down to size in Procrustean classrooms is a loss for us all. The freedom that school choice affords, though vital given the miserable state of American education, is not enough. What matters most are the ends toward which that freedom is used.
Homeschooling today is a growth industry. Angela Watson, director of the John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Research Lab, says researchers assumed that with schools open again, “everybody would go back to their normal way of educating. And so, every year, we keep thinking that the [homeschooling] numbers are going to drop.” But her lab’s latest report shows the opposite.
The total number of homeschooled students in the U.S. is tough to pin down; twenty states either don’t collect data on homeschool participation or don’t report it. Of the twenty-one states that reported data for the 2023–24 school year in time for the report, however, all but two showed increases in homeschooling, ranging from two percent (Georgia) to 29 percent (Delaware). Notably, the number of homeschoolers is climbing even as the total number of U.S. students is declining. The report dodges the crucial question of why this is happening, but concludes that the broad shift toward homeschooling “is not driven by a global pandemic or sudden disruptions to traditional schooling. Something else is driving [it].”
In his memoir, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig remarks that not one of his school friends in fin-de-siècle Vienna “did not hate the way in which our best interests and intentions were inhibited, bored, and suppressed on the scholastic treadmill.” Many American parents learned for the first time during the pandemic just how miserably plodding the pace of that treadmill was; how elementary was the curriculum their kids were being taught—and how simple it was to teach it themselves. In June 2021, the writer Wesley Yang tweeted: “Homeschooling showed me you can teach the K-5 math curriculum to a 6 year old in six weeks with 1 hour of instruction per day.” His tweet inspired the tech CEO Austen Allred to consider experimenting to see how fast his own six-year-old could “fly through K-5 math,” using the math-tutoring app Synthesis, the AI-powered answer engine Perplexity, “and a small reward for each year-end test he can pass.” Clearly this is not homeschooling as I knew it, but Americans are a practical people. We move with the times.
Sadly, not every set of parents can stand in for a school; not every little boy is a larval Palmer Luckey. The downside of homeschooling was aptly, if pungently, put by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” (It is cold comfort that—as he added—they may not mean to.) Any adult, especially a parent, writes DeWitt, “has a terrible power over a child.” The potential for permanent damage goes up exponentially when said parent serves also as her kid’s teacher, headmaster, guidance counselor, school nurse, janitor, and hall monitor. (Homeschooling would be perfect for the Munchausen-by-proxy set.) That homeschoolers may suffer from cloistered upbringings, as is often claimed, is nowhere near the full extent of possible handicaps. This is more difficult to capture in data than the blatant failings of public schools, but given my own experience and that of family and friends, I feel confident asserting it all the same.
As Ludo grows up, his and his mother’s poverty weighs more heavily on him. He shrinks from the signs of spiritual deadness Sibylla shows after long hours spent typing old back issues of such brain-rot as Tropical Fish Hobbyist and Carpworld into the computer. One of DeWitt’s great themes is the way parents make choices that mangle their children’s lives. Sibylla’s mother comes from a musical family—veritable Von Trapps. The youngest of five, she watches as one by one her siblings go to their tyrannical Viennese father and tell him they want to be musicians or singers, and one by one he shunts them into mundane, soul-crushing careers: “their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.” Of her family history, Sibylla says: “I used to think that things might have been different.” Well, quite. Father and mother don’t always know best.
To the unequal distribution of intelligence, homeschooling adds a fundamental unfairness of its own: It is not fair that some children have smarter or more capable or more patient parents than others, parents who are willing and able to educate them at home. It is not fair that Ludo learns Greek as a toddler because his mother has Homer’s epics in their original language lying around. “All superior education,” says Nietzsche, “can only concern the exception.” Homeschoolers are less a community of minds than a nation of solitaries.
Like Yang and Allred, I see homeschooling as a way to take your child’s limiter off. What good is it to jettison student clubs and bake sales, proms and pep rallies, if you won’t let him fly higher? If I remain strongly ambivalent about my homeschooling years, it is less because of the ballast I had to let go of than the baggage I was made to keep on board: being kept from skipping grades in middle school (my father thought I needed more socialization); missing the chance to ace AP tests for college credit (my parents couldn’t afford the exam fees); matriculating as a National Merit Scholar with a full ride at a state university well below my potential (my parents couldn’t pay for multiple college applications)—Harrison Bergeron was hardly so encumbered. But homeschooling also prepared me to make the most of it. (As it prepared me later to earn a master’s degree from Columbia.) I checked out of the campus library books in which no one else, among tens of thousands of students, was interested: Eckermann’s Words of Goethe, Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, David Jones’s The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments. Years of independent study meant I had little trouble applying myself. I could have enrolled at sixteen; by nineteen I could have had my bachelor’s degree. Instead? Instead I lived my actual life.
You can’t rest content in counterfactuals. Yet the path untrod holds an irresistible fascination. Ludo reflects enviously: “J. S. Mill did not go to school. He was taught by his father and that was why he was 25 years ahead of everybody else.” It can just as easily go the other way, as I could have told him. As indeed he learns for himself when, abandoning all hope of connecting with his biological dad, like a wandering ronin he sets out in search of a suitable surrogate. One by one he tracks down a renowned astronomer, a famed artist, an expert card player, an intrepid adventurer—his own personal league of extraordinary gentlemen. His opening gambit, figured as a test of samurai skill from Kurosawa’s epic (“A good samurai will parry the blow”), is to tell each of them that he is their long-lost son. They become, however briefly, his counselors, tutors, benefactors.
Though homeschooling has of all pedagogical pathways the widest variation in opportunities and outcomes, at bottom it is about giving kids not an edge but an education. “People forget,” writes Nietzsche, “that education, the process of cultivation itself, is the end.” What is needed is “not the public-school teacher” but genuine educators “who are themselves educated, superior and noble intellects.” As my mother got her degrees before becoming a homeschool mom, so DeWitt earned an Oxford doctorate in Greek and Latin literature before embarking on The Last Samurai. In one passage Sibylla compares the field of linguistics to Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony and Cézanne’s brilliant landscapes:
& in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words
All is a swirl of color, an image of harmonious play. Ludo’s name recalls Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens, about the centrality of play in human society. Play always is a free act of discovery, in stark contrast to “the principle of slavery” by which the Italian educator Maria Montessori felt that early-twentieth-century schools were run. At her Casa dei Bambini in Rome, she developed a system that emphasized hands-on experimentation and self-directed learning. Were it not for students’ natural curiosity, the Montessori method and homeschooling would both be impracticable.
The standard armature of education is not lightly lost. Yet what homeschooling offers at its best is a matchless alchemy, whereby the lifeless, leaden dross of schooldays such as Nietzsche and Zweig suffered through is transmuted into golden hours of purposive play. Admittedly a certain quotient of drudgery, of rote memorization, may be unavoidable. Not everything will be retained. My Latin learning long ago decayed. When I read Homer I must reach—unlike Ludo and his magpie-minded mḗtēr—for Richmond Lattimore’s and Robert Fitzgerald’s English renderings. But it was due to homeschooling, and especially to my mother, that I learned things which have shaped the course of my life: that credentials matter less than merit, or should; that true knowledge is its own reward; that language itself is an adventure, beyond what is being said.
