Lavinia reviewed The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
Review of 'The Last Samurai' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
J.S. Mill had an extremely unusual and challenging early education. He was educated by his father, who had started him learning Greek at the age of three. Using J.S. Mill as an example, Helen DeWitt wonders what would happen if parents would make some interesting decisions about their children’s education. What would happen for example if you had a single mother who decided to try out the principles of J.S. Mill to educate her son and use one of the most thrilling movie epics, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,“to provide male role models for her boy.
Sibylla, who makes her living as a typist, and her boy, Ludo, live a relatively precarious life in London. Ludo does not go to school. She had started to teach him to read at the age of two, then go to Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. Then mathematics, physics and aerodynamics. Ludo picks up …
J.S. Mill had an extremely unusual and challenging early education. He was educated by his father, who had started him learning Greek at the age of three. Using J.S. Mill as an example, Helen DeWitt wonders what would happen if parents would make some interesting decisions about their children’s education. What would happen for example if you had a single mother who decided to try out the principles of J.S. Mill to educate her son and use one of the most thrilling movie epics, Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,“to provide male role models for her boy.
Sibylla, who makes her living as a typist, and her boy, Ludo, live a relatively precarious life in London. Ludo does not go to school. She had started to teach him to read at the age of two, then go to Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. Then mathematics, physics and aerodynamics. Ludo picks up everything quickly and at the age of eight he could speak several languages and read Greek, Latin and Hebrew classics. His progress makes you think what would happen if children had the advantage of his, or J.S. Mill, unusual education, if the opportunities offered to Ludo where the norm. We don’t know whether he was a genius or not- only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.
The central notion of The Last Samurai it is, I think, that most people never really reach their potential, because we live in a society where from a very early age we learn that some things are very hard–or not practical – to learn. The increased marketisation of education does not encourage children to use their imagination or inspire exploration of great literary texts outside school.
In the second part of the book, Ludo, now eleven years old, becomes curious about his father. His mother refuses to tell him who his father is, but he imagines, perhaps because of the role models he has from The Seven Samurai movie, that he is a hero. But when he meets him and see that he is a disappointment, he goes out looking for a better father. He chooses several men and he test them to see if they are, or could be, a decent father for him.
This is not an easy book to read, it has Greek, Japanese and Icelandic, pages full of numbers and equations, and all sort of different things. It is a brilliant and challenging book but Helen DeWitt is able to write about difficult things in a very accessible and funny way.
If you haven’t read this book yet, find a copy (I got mine from my local library) and try to amend this.
