Home School

I was looking for a book by Evelyn Waugh in the library and ran across a sequel to Charles Webb's The Graduate called Home School. Naturally, I was interested, since it was about home schooling. I also saw The Graduate when I was in college.

After having read a couple of reviews of the book and read about Webb's very strange biography, I can affirm something we all know anyway. The home schooling movement is very broad based. Webb home schooled his two children in the 1970s, illegally in California. He also managed a nudist camp at one point, according to the internet sources.

Here is a quote from the book.

Underlying the education of the children was Benjamin and Elaine's [the main characters from The Graduate besides, you know, Mrs. Robinson] conviction that a child's natural learning impulse must be allowed to develop freely, unfettered by direction from above any more than is strictly necessary, and that if this freedom is permitted, innate curiosity will guide the child to the objects of greatest interest and relevance to its life, resulting in an absence of those inhibitions derived from forced institutional learning that can stamp various kinds of psychologically damaging behavior on the emerging personality of the traditionally schooled child. So it was not out of the ordinary the next morning that the family found itself in the back yard to discuss the possibility of Jason constructing a guillotine behind the house.

I haven't read the book, nor do I have any particular desire to do so.

Now, where is that Waugh book?