Your reporter could not possibly know the student writer’s thoughts about her op-ed piece (“Bromfield sophomore … did not know what she was starting” Newspaper Article Causes Controversy, Harvard Press, May 18) because Alice Rennie never spoke to her. Nor asked permission to print her name. Nor asked to quote her.
Further, Rennie never interviewed Michael McGarty, the student’s teacher and advisor to the school paper. Indeed, the op-ed piece was a school assignment, not intended for publication but for journalism class. The student’s use of such rhetorical devices as synecdoche, in which a part represents the whole, and hyperbole, which employs “extravagant exaggeration” (Webster’s) to make a point are in the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift. His 1729 editorial “A Modest Proposal” suggested a novel cure to the Irish famine: both hunger and over-population could be eradicated if only the Irish would eat their children.
I know well the student’s complex feelings about publication of her class assignment, because I am her mom. She feared the subject matter was too provocative but was cajoled into print since, as her teacher counseled, controversy is healthy for a newspaper. One wonders: did anyone pause to think whether controversy would be healthy for the student?
As a parent, I’ve watched my young teen handle months of this “controversy,” including meetings with the principal, assistant principal, Mirror editors, sixth-grade teachers, and students, with strength, sensitivity and self-reliance. Never has she sought or accepted intervention from her parents. But I question the judgment of the adults involved. How easy it has been for a teacher, Press reporter, and Press editor to extol the virtues of controversy, as long as the pressure of that controversy is being borne by someone else—in this case, a young writer who happens to be on the wrong side of the inherent power imbalance with adults. In other words, a child.
Laura Martineau
Stow Road
