Home-schooling has by now a pretty mixed reputation, mainly, and perhaps sadly, because it has been taken up by white, allegedly Christian parents who assert their desire to "protect" their children from the secularist heresies of public school. Unfortunately, the often unstated subtext is racist. Many of these parents don’t want their children in school with children whose skin is not "white".

Other, more constructive arguments can be made for home-schooling, arguments which are not religious, not racist. A good summary of these arguments can be found in A.S. Neill’s classic Summerhill.

We recently received an e-mail from a couple who 20 years ago acted on those better arguments and kept their two children out of the school system. The parents—the mother is a Ph.D. biochemist, the father an MSW social worker—alternated careers. One would work full-time for three or four years while the other stayed home, then they would switch.

Home was a comfortable farm house two hours outside Washington, D.C., in Virginia. There on 40 acres, with a suitable array of animals and crops, their two children grew up. It was home, and it was school.

Other children and other parents were involved, so the children were not bereft of socializing skills, as system educators say. These other children and parents were not just of color, they were of colors.

No religious indoctrination. No racist indoctrination. So far, so good.

Now it gets a little bit tricky as we tiptoe in the direction of Ted Kozinksi territory.

Both parents, whatever their educational credentials, are by temperament profoundly and sincerely anti-technology. Not so much in the Amish, back-to-the18th-century way, but more in the Rousseau/Thoreau back-to-nature way.

They accept into their lives minimal technology. There is a TV in the house, a radio, a stereo, a computer, a telephone. But use of all those devices is severely restricted and controlled.

How did this shape the education of the children? In many ways of course, but this group of parents agreed on one basic rule. In choosing reading matter for every level of school, no material written or printed after 1950 would be allowed. The children were permitted only brief exposure to television and radio.

You are about to read a product of that environment.

The e-mail we received was from the mother. She felt her son, who is now 23, showed some ability as a writer. In her message she talked about how as a small child he had played with words the way other children played with toys. Over the years, she said, he had written many stories. One in particular, a longish piece he recently finished, she thought we might be interested in.

That piece is The Long Jaded Wrath. In length, it’s between a short story and a novel, what in European literature is called a novella, a genre which has never flourished in America.

What caught our eye was not the structure but the content, and the style.

Yes, there’s no doubt the boy has talent. Words pour out of him, but not just any words. Carefully considered, weighed words.

But they are the words of a young, talented writer for whom the last 50 years don’t exist. No Beats, no Existentialism, no 60s, no gonzo journalism, no post-modernism, no hip irony. A young, talented writer who was very, very intensely schooled only in what came before 1950. And, his parents explained to me, it was not just the old DWEM canon. The schooling also included dead non-European males and females. Anything in world culture was OK, as long as it was produced before 1950.

Why are we publishing such an archaic, not to say arcane, piece of work? For several reasons. First, for what it is, taken on its own old-fashioned terms, it is fascinating. Second, the author, clearly a product of his unusual education, has in some strange way leap-frogged the last 50 years. True, he writes in a style that can only be called "quaint", but in the content, in the story that he tells, he seems to be much less mired in the past than pointing toward a future that, if he's right, is hardly the future any of us technophiles would come up with extrapolating from our hip, light-speed, digital tude of irony-to-the-death.

What is a bit unsettling: If you can accept his long sentences and paragraphs and his out-of-date vocabulary, the case he makes for an alternative future can be quite convincing in a disturbing, almost subversive way.

He is not, we guarantee, going where you think may he is, no fundamentalist, kill-the-non-believers tack for this kid. Along toward the middle, for example, his protagonist veers off into religious ritual and you think, oh no, here we go with the old chip-of-piety on the shoulder. We'd ask you to bear with our young author. One thing he seems to be doing with the story is a kind of cultural "onteogeny recapitulates phylogeny"; thus, the pious liturgy that pops up in Chapter 3 is only another in a series of developmental stepping stones.

What's missing throughout, that is to say, what the current reader who IS aware of the last 50 years misses, is humor. But then that is understandable if the story is a capsulization of human history, which, face it, is a saga more notable for its deadly serious bloodbaths than for its self-effacing comic turns.

Our young author wrote The Long Jaded Wrath in 1999, spent six months polishing it, and presented it to his parents recently. The parents do not want publicity for themselves or for the son. We asked him to come up with a pen name, which he did.