"I don't consider him to be sheltered at all," said Kathy Bleutge, chairman of the Sterling Playmakers board of directors, who has worked with Matthew in three productions. "He's really pretty savvy. He's an example of when it works, home schooling at its best."
Matthew has friends from each of these activities, and they get together to go bowling or to the movies. There's no partying or drinking, and no dating either. Marion Smedberg said she thinks that dating should lead naturally to marriage and that high school dating -- she calls it "serial pairing up and breaking up" -- does not teach teenagers the kind of commitment they need to make a long-term marriage work.
That's okay with Matthew. He plans to wait to date until he meets the person he knows is right for him. He said he thinks that people who are fixated on finding someone to date and then marry usually end up with the wrong person.
"You should wait to find it," he said. "You shouldn't hunt for it. If you don't find it, then you just are not meant to marry."
In fact, Matthew says the home-schoolers he knows may be better adjusted socially than kids who attend school.
Home-schooled students "are not antisocial at all," he said. "They're better balanced because they don't have the pressures to fit in. A lot of girls go with the crowd and squeal about lipstick and fashions and don't allow themselves to be profound. A lot of guys only aspire to be hunks."
Bleutge, who used to teach drama at Park View High School, said she has met home-schooled kids who had trouble adjusting to the classroom and other group activities after spending so much time at home. Matthew, she said, is a uniquely smart and confident 17-year-old who would excel anywhere. When she first met him, she thought he was about 27.
Home schooling, Marion Smedberg acknowledged, is not for everyone. It takes self-starting parents and children. The parents must love learning for its own sake and be able to teach that love to their children. It has worked for the Smedbergs.
Marion and her husband, Michael, took their oldest son, Ben, out of Loudoun County public schools in the sixth grade. School simply wasn't hard enough for him, she said.
"I liked all of his teachers, but we just kept waiting for school to get challenging," Marion Smedberg said. As Ben entered middle school and started advanced courses at Park View, Smedberg said Ben's education took a turn for the subjective, an educational philosophy with which she does not agree.
"I felt like there were too many subjects where they were teaching anything you think is right, is right," she said. "In social studies, they would ask, 'Who do you think discovered America?' They were not actually being taught."
Ben missed the cutoff to be a National Merit semifinalist by two points. The younger children all challenge each other and promise that they will give Matthew strong competition when their turn comes to take the test. Ben recently graduated from Catholic University and is music director at St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Washington.
The Smedbergs use textbooks and class curricula recommended by home-schooling organizations. All of the children learn Latin, which has become Marion Smedberg's specialty. She teaches the classical language of Catholicism to classes of home-schooled children several times a week.
The children take different subjects each year, and the family formulates goals that must be accomplished each semester. They take weekends and summers off, and caring for the family's younger children is an important part of every day's schedule.
