The whole attitude towards education is rather bizarre in the end In fact, it's exactly the opposite of what one might reasonably expect: Starting out on the childish notion of "school is just useless waste of time!", ending up with the experience that - lo and behold! - school DOES come in useful sometimes. In HP, it's the other way round.
The camping trip has some of the trappings of that, but it doesn't deliver. Oh yes - just like the pensieve vignettes in HBP which reminded me strongly of Hercule Poirot's way of eliciting accounts about the past from different people in order to draw ingenious conclusions from. In both cases, it is as if JKR used the outward trappings but without ultimately understanding what their point was. His history etc. wasn't needed at all, it was just a backstory told to fill out HBP. I can't be bothered at the moment to go through all those scenes, but I very strongly suspect they really were nothing more than a colourful depiction of Tom's life. I kept waiting for this making sense in the way, that at some moment, Harry was going to realize Dumbledore had been wrong in a crucial assumption of his, because he (harry) had seen these memories and picked up different things, something Dumbledore couldn't have told him because he overlooked it. But no - it was just the wizarding equivalent of a telenovela he was watching...
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In fact, it's exactly the opposite of what one might reasonably expect: Starting out on the childish notion of "school is just useless waste of time!", ending up with the experience that - lo and behold! - school DOES come in useful sometimes. In HP, it's the other way round.
The camping trip has some of the trappings of that, but it doesn't deliver.
Oh yes - just like the pensieve vignettes in HBP which reminded me strongly of Hercule Poirot's way of eliciting accounts about the past from different people in order to draw ingenious conclusions from. In both cases, it is as if JKR used the outward trappings but without ultimately understanding what their point was.
His history etc. wasn't needed at all, it was just a backstory told to fill out HBP.
I can't be bothered at the moment to go through all those scenes, but I very strongly suspect they really were nothing more than a colourful depiction of Tom's life. I kept waiting for this making sense in the way, that at some moment, Harry was going to realize Dumbledore had been wrong in a crucial assumption of his, because he (harry) had seen these memories and picked up different things, something Dumbledore couldn't have told him because he overlooked it. But no - it was just the wizarding equivalent of a telenovela he was watching...