Homeschooled Novelist

We love homeschooling success stories.

Now here's another feather in the cap of the movement. As of this posting, a little 500-page fantasy novel called Eragon is 35th on Amazon's sales rankings. Considering the breadth of Amazon's shelves, that's saying a lot. (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is currently 59th.)

And Brian Micklethwait reports, "The boy who wrote Eragon was homeschooled!"

If Christopher Paolini turns out to be the perfectly nice, well adjusted, civilised person which I fully expect him to turn out to be, then that will ram the homeschooling point with particular force, because the popular fear is that whereas when maths professors do it, that's okay, maybe, when people called things like "Ma Prophet" get mixed up in it, only bad things can result. But now, it seems, the result is... Eragon.

We'd love to see more parents (yes, even survivalist cult members) given the legal option to homeschool their children. The key is freedom of choice.