James now wishes our parents had made reading a priority for him. “It would have made my life a lot easier,” he recalls. “Struggling wasn’t fun. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do better in school.” I can vividly remember him in the sixth grade, crying about his drama class. “Because when I read aloud,” James says, “I would trip up over simple words.” But he did have the wherewithal to seek help. In eighth grade, James was so concerned about his atrocious spelling that he asked a teacher what he could do. She gave him a third-grade spelling book and told him to start on Page 1.

These academic shortcomings can be traced to my mom’s desire for educational spontaneity. At first, as she wrote, she was “careful to keep exactly to the schedule.” But she soon relaxed. “Classes were canceled whenever something interesting materialized. How to open an art-house movie theater was a course,” she said. “That’s what you did for months instead of having classes.” While watching “The Blue Angel” is fun, inasmuch as a psychosexual German film can be for a child, it doesn’t help prepare you for the realities of a typical classroom or provide you with building blocks for the fundamentals.

James has conflicting feelings about my parents’ teaching style. He acknowledges that his own son, Zac, who was introduced to formal education early, has many of his own learning difficulties. But his approach is the opposite of my parents’. “I’m on top of Zac,” James told me. “I don’t want him to fall behind like I did.”

My mother has her own take on James’s learning curve: “James had what I called a ‘Ping-Pong’ mind; he had trouble in certain areas but always came up with the most interesting ideas. That was just James, why change him? Why say, ‘James, you have to study more,’ or, ‘James, we’re going to drill on spelling words tonight’? We knew he’d be fine.”

I have often wondered how the home-schooled fared compared with their classbound peers. While advocates make glowing claims — that the home-schooled do better on their college boards and vote more often — there is little hard data on achievement. Not that statistics would have influenced my parents’ choice. To evaluate home schooling based on quantitative measures of success would go against everything that drew my mother to the idea. A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, believed that a child should live his or her own life, “not the life that his anxious parents think he should live.” And this was how my parents continued to approach our education once my siblings and I were in school. A failed test? No big deal. And if we wanted to stay home for a day, instead of pretending to be sick like other kids, we could every so often simply slip a note under their door that read, “Please don’t wake me up tomorrow.” Eventually we all settled in. Even my dad. He went on to publish several books, one of which was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and later became executive editor of The Week. The “counter, original, spare, strange” experiment had come to an end. “But it was one that I wouldn’t have traded for anything,” my dad says. “At least we had given you an adventure. I don’t think any damage was done.”

Despite the prophecy of a doomed future, none of us turned out to be a social misfit or an underachiever. Three of us graduated from good colleges. Mary is now a partner in an advertising agency. James conquered his reading and spelling issues and has been a top editor at several major magazines. Unlike my dad, I pretty much enjoyed my entire 16 years in school, and work as a writer. John found himself adrift for a while. He enrolled at Queens College but dropped out several times before giving up college for good. He got a job stocking shelves at a supermarket and would spend whole afternoons just lying in bed watching TV. At night, he’d hang out at dives on Northern Boulevard in Queens. My parents were at a loss. I remember months of tension followed by late-night discussions with tears on both sides. Finally my parents came up with yet another strange idea — paying John to make dinner for them every night. He found cooking relaxed him and helped relieve the stress of feeling like a “disappointment.” It also made him realize that success didn’t necessarily depend on a college degree. He got a low-level job from a colleague of my father’s, helping to install a new computer system at a magazine, and went on to a career in information systems. He is now a successful real estate developer.

My mother concluded her Times article by emphasizing that educating her children at home was a reflection of her most cherished beliefs. “Children’s lives are more than products that must be molded until they adapt well to society, or to another school, or to the work force. As it is now, a child’s life is very much bound up with schools and schooling, and that animating force that gives life to each child is ignored.” Today she still holds that her work was not in vain. “You’re all well adjusted and happy. And all of you are close to one another. What else could I possibly want?”