is
only sixteen years old. He has been to three prep schools and has been expelled from all three
of them. Therefore, his educational background is minimal. He must have had very little
high-school-type education, and he shows that he has no self-discipline. At age sixteen he
should have completed a couple of years of high school. But if he was expelled from Whooton
School and at Elkton Hills, and has just been expelled from Pencey as the novel opens, he cannot
have acquired much learning during his high-school-level career to date.
His
conversation with the old teacherin Chapter Two tells almost everything about Holden's
educational background. We realize that he got expelled, not for bad conduct, but for academic
indifference, for flunking out of everything but English classes. He is obviously on a slippery
slope academically speaking. Once a student starts flunking because of nonattendance and
noncompliance, it is nearly impossible for his teachers to turn him...
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