Intellectual Child Abuse?

illustration by Aaron Meshon

In spite of the impression the Dowbrigade may have given
in his slashing
condemnation of the practice, home schooling is making
inroads not only in the heartland, but even in liberal Massachusetts,
and not only at matchbox colleges like Patrick
Henry University, but
even at the "World’s Greatest University" (no, not BU). Take a look at
this description from today’s Boston
Globe Magazine….

Maureen Carey’s
Cambridge living room looks more like a teenage slumber party
than an
English class.
Eight
kids sprawl
across
the faded Oriental rugs and overstuffed armchairs in various degrees
of slouch. Two huddle under blankets, and several wear knit hats, even
though the room is comfortably warm. One ponytailed boy sits cross-legged
on a trunk. Toe socks poke out from blue jeans and sweats, while a
pile of shoes waits at the door.

Despite the blankets and the posture, this is not a sleepy bunch. Fueled
by tea and homemade challah, the teens – who hail from Cambridge, Newton,
even Reading – are 300 pages into Umberto Eco’s weighty novel The Name
of the Rose, and they’re slogging forward, undaunted by the dense, medieval
mystery. In this class, students never take a quiz or write a report.
They don’t even have homework. All the reading happens here on the
second floor
of Carey’s multifamily house, where she’s led literature classes for
home-schooled students for eight years.

Well, all we can do is express our condolences for these poor kids.
We can’t imagine having to work all the way through Ecco’s unreadable tome
"The Name of the Rose". Normally a fan of conspiratorial, convoluted
fiction, the Dowbrigade made several attempts to tackle this bestseller,
but repeatedly found it more useful for pummeling students about the head
than for enjoyable or illuminating reading.

It can’t be the lenght or opaquity of the prose, since our all-time
favorite novel remains Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow", which we are
planning on reading for a personal record sixth time during our upcoming
South American expedition, thanks to a timely heads-up from our "Cyber-vecino"
Ion. Copyright issues aside, GR is now safely stashed inside our iBook,
awaiting the balmy beaches and uninterrupted hours that beckon from south
of the Equator.

Why then did we have such trouble with Ecco? Perhaps because, between
the lyrical riffs and overlaid themes, counter-themes and sub-themes
of Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon makes us laugh, consistently.  Humberto
Ecco seems, to this reader at least, completely devoid of a sense of
humor. Our heart goes out to Maureen Carey’s students….

from the Boston Globe Magazine