Richie's Picks: SCHOOLED by Gordon Korman, Hyperion, July 2007, ISBN:
0-7868-5692-0
"I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to
philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
-- Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"
It's just over half a mile as the crow flies from my goat barn and orchard
to the border of what was once Morning Star Ranch. Founded by Lou Gottlieb
on thirty hilly acres of redwoods and apple trees he'd purchased outside
Graton, California during his peak of success as a member of The Limelighters, the
counterculture commune achieved international notoriety when it was featured
-- including provocative photographs -- in the cover article, "The
Hippies," from the July 7, 1967 issue of Time magazine.
"And we're not the way you used to be when you were very young"
-- Paul Kantner, "Mau-Mau (Amerikon)"
Ever since those Summer of Love headlines of forty years ago, there has
existed a division in America between those who perceive hippie ideals to be
radical, hedonistic, and irresponsible; and those who believe that sharing freely
with others, offering a helping hand to others, and looking past skin
colors, body shapes, name brands, and sexual identities to find a child of God in
everyone, are good examples of real "traditional values."
Decades later, during my years of working in the bookstore downtown in
Sebastopol, it was a trip to get to know and booktalk to the book-loving and
idea-loving members of my adopted community, including many who'd arrived in those
mythical, magical days whilst I'd still been a youngster back East in middle
school and high school. I was forever being awed by the sudden appearance
in the store of such local icons as Bill Wheeler and Micky Hart.
"Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again"
-- Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, "Ripple"
Many of the ideals of The Sixties live on today in people living in and
around little towns out here like Sebastopol, Graton, Occidental, and Freestone.
There is still a place where people like to share. It is a part of the
world where there is an abundance of stores and restaurants that cater to those
of us who have now spent decades trying to eat vegetarian, unprocessed, and
organic. And for all the people I know around here who eschew television sets
in their homes, I expect that there are some Third World countries with far
more TVs per capita.
"I was thirteen the first time I saw a police officer up close. He was
arresting me for driving without a license. At the time, I didn't know what a
license was. I wasn't too clear on what being arrested meant either.
"But by then they were loading Rain onto a stretcher to rush her in for
X-rays. So I barely noticed the handcuffs the officer slapped on my wrists.
" 'Who's the owner of this pickup?'
" 'It belongs to the community,' I told him.
"He made a note on a ring-bound pad. 'What community? Golf club? Condo
deal?'
" 'Garland Farm.'
"He frowned. 'Never heard of that one.'
"Rain would have been pleased. That was the whole point of the community --
to allow us to escape the money-hungry rat race of modern society. If
people didn't know us, they couldn't find us, and we could live our lives in peace.
" 'It's an alternative farm commune,' I explained.
"The officer goggled at me. 'Alternative -- you mean like hippies?'
" 'Rain used to be one, back in the sixties. There were fourteen families
at Garland then. Now its just Rain and me.' "
Capricorn (Cap) Anderson is a kid who has never watched television nor eaten
meat. His parents died of malaria in Namibia years ago, while serving in
the Peace Corps. Back when Cap was really young there was still a thriving
community at Garland Farm. But that is no longer the case.
When Cap's grandmother, Rain, slips from the branches of a tree while she is
picking plums and breaks her hip, thirteen-year-old Cap is suddenly left
without the only person in his life and is given over to a social worker for
temporary placement. Unbeknownst to most of the story's characters, that social
worker, Mrs. Donnelly, had long ago been a child (named Floramundi) at
Garland Farm before her parents soured on the hippie trip:
"I was five when my family joined the community -- too young to remember any
life before that. For six long years, that place was my universe. I ran
around barefoot, wearing peasant dresses, shared my parents with other kids,
protested the Vietnam War, did farm chores, and listened to a whole lot of
sitar music."
Now decades later, Mrs. Donnelly well remembers Garland's
tyrant-of-a-teacher, Rain. Mrs. Donnelly takes Capricorn into her own home and
enrolls him in
the local middle school.
"Well here's another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul."
--The Beatles, "Glass Onion"
So you have this thirteen-year-old who is academically stellar -- in those
curricular and "practical" areas of study that Rain has deemed to be important
-- and who is thoroughly clueless about so many "practical" aspects of
surviving as a Twenty-first Century middle school student. This clearly makes for
a tale of great humor and slapstick when such an innocent and kind kid is
fed into the meat-grinder of middle school cliques, social food chains, and
bullies.
It is also a total crack-up to see Cap's fascination with Trigonometry and
Tears, Mrs. Donnelly's sixteen-year-old daughter's favorite after-school soap
opera:
"When I watched it, everything around me seemed to disappear, and the whole
world was happening on that little screen. Those people were so real, with
true-to-life problems and big decisions that had to be made. I kept wishing
that the characters had someone like Rain to turn to in times of trouble, but
they didn't. They had their parents, who were even more messed up and
confused than the kids were. It was a perfect symbol for life outside Garland --
huge, complicated, and full of hidden traps and pitfalls. Plus, every now and
then, the program stops and the TV tells you about all the great things you
can buy, like a miracle cream that makes it scientifically impossible to get
a pimple."
But, of course, as with any significant piece of social satire -- and
SCHOOLED is both an exceptional middle school read and an exception piece of
social
satire -- you have a whole 'nother level of societal issues to be
contemplated and debated and even taught.
An underlying issue encountered in SCHOOLED, one that has perplexed me for
decades, is this: I understand the desire to remove oneself and one's family
from the consumerism, the rat race, the competition, and the corruption that
was rampant in the Sixties and has only gotten far worse since then. Many who
practice the lifestyle in which Rain has raised Capricorn honestly believe
that they are setting an example by modeling the manner by which everyone
should live. But others would question whether it is moral to, in effect,
ignore oppression, tyranny, intolerance, and war by removing oneself (and one's
voice) from society.
Having grown up being affected by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam
War on the nightly news, I found myself as a teenager who was in tune with
some of the Back-to-the-Land philosophy, but who was unwilling -- back then and
still today -- to toss the TV out or to refrain from watching and speaking
out about what is happening in the world. But that's just me.
SCHOOLED, told from the points of view of Capricorn Anderson and a cast of
adolescent and adult characters who come to know him, will provide readers
with a lot of laughs and some serious questions about what in the way we live is
really important.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/)
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