Published: December 1, 2006

Don’t Call It School

More like a YMCA for home-schoolers, North Star runs on its students' independence.

As I talked with a kid named Abe Jenkins in the hallway at North Star, a center for teenage homeschoolers, in Hadley, Massachusetts, I couldn’t help but admire his energy. Speaking in bursts of words that broke against the wall behind me, he seemed far happier than most high school sophomores I’d known. Though he wasn’t in high school. Perhaps that was the point.

“I’d be miserable at Northampton High, which is where I’d be if I weren’t here,” he said. “But here I can do what I want to do—that’s the whole difference.”

He’d just finished a math class called “Prime Numbers” taught by the father of a North Star alumna. Chatting with Abe, I had two thoughts: “What a good, interesting kid.” And, “Man, he definitely would have been miserable at the...