Then there’s my niece. She did fine in school. Oh there were behavior problems (she didn’t fall far from the family tree), but she attended the required counseling and she had understanding and support through it all at home. She excelled in solid subjects. She acquired science, math, literature, Latin. And when she told my sister she was done mid-way through her junior year of high school, we worked to get her out of the place a year early (only the PE requirement presented a challenge, and everyone knows a doctor who will write a note). She went to college a month before her 17th birthday. She completed her bachelor’s degree.

So how’d she become such a vehement school-hater? Why is Fuck School her mantra? Why is homeschooling her decision? She’s a fully actuated grownup, living the life she chose and working the career she loves, well-educated and capable of independent research. She says she is keeping her kids away from school so “they can become the remarkable people they are.” A situation she achieved while attending public school. What makes her think school is so powerful that it can stop her children?

And then I look at the men she has chosen. From the moment puberty set it, my niece has had a boyfriend. She just trotted up to whomever she fancied, said “I like you,” and it was a done deal (we once compared notes and I admitted I had never asked a guy out, and she replied that it was the opposite for her – she’d never been asked out).

I review the males she left behind and also her spouse, the father of her kids, the love of her life and her partner in everything, and I realize they are all wounded birds.

One was self-consciously scrawny. Another was bookish and embarrassed about his looks. A third had a learning disability and a prime motivation to conceal it. Others managed to weld ignorance onto arrogance and go to battle against phantoms. All avoided classrooms and waged war on homework. All have selected small communities and narrow agendas.

Sure they were creative and eccentric. But they were also weak. Like so many of the boys I knew and cared for in the old detention rooms. School didn’t serve them well, but they lacked the capacity to make it work anyway. They tucked their chins down and hunched away as if blows were falling on them, and they flirted, floated, and fantasized vengeful dreams.

It strikes me that my niece’s scholophobia is like Gulliver’s misanthropy: learned instead of experienced. Objective. She hates school on behalf of those she has loved. It’s similar to the way I have hated the mothers of my best friends. I sure couldn’t place the hate on my pals…

Looking in this direction, I see they were all sexually retarded. They still giggle at penis jokes. They love comic books and trading cards. Their worlds are populated with heroes and villains and their ambitions are epic but amorphous. Their lawbreaking is trivial.

Funny, but through today’s scope what I see is a small collection of individuals, developmentally stuck in early adolescence. Richard landing in private school and my niece experiencing my sister’s second divorce (we didn’t imagine then that losing a loathed stepdad would have such an adverse effect, but we wonder now). The school-haters all become comprehensible if I forget how long they have lived and view them as incipient teens. Contemplating sex while they hurl spitballs. Assembling little platoons as they stomp on textbooks. I understand a person can get stuck just about anywhere on the time line.

I can fix school. It’s obvious and easy. People love to sing and dance; teach song and dance at school and you’ll cover music and physical education. Let the students play at recess. And folks of all ages love stories: use narrative to teach. The school day is too long and the school year is agricultural. Stop that! Make school year-round, but give several weeks off and let the day be no longer than four hours. Have older kids teach the younger ones; that’s so natural it’s completely crazy that it isn’t done always and everywhere.

I can fix school but I can’t repair my niece and I never had a beneficial effect on Richard.