Reschooling: Leah McLaren and flap copy

I think most people assume flap copy isn’t necessarily the author’s writing. While it can include author input, it could also be an editor, copywriter, publicist or some combination thereof.  Flap copy is a particular animal, and wouldn’t spring to mind as the first choice for an example of the ‘author’s voice’.  Plus, if you want readers to believe you’d actually read a particular book, you might crack it open and select an exemplary sentence or two from the interior, rather than the promo blurb from Amazon.

Here’s Leah McLaren, this Leah McLaren, on unschooling in the Globe and Mail:

In his recent book, Free To Learn, Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College, argues that “children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.”

And here’s the promo blurb on Amazon:

In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that…Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.

The selected bits appear in quotes in McLaren’s piece, suggesting they’re written by Gray and come from the body of his book.  No quotes surround the same selection in the blurb. 

Here it is again on Boing Boing - along with an excerpt which includes a sentence beginning, “Children come into this world burning to learn…”, though in the actual excerpt (reproduced below the advertisement), the remainder of the sentence is different.

Is it unreasonable to expect a highly paid columnist in a paper like The Globe to choose a passage that demonstrates they’ve read a book - rather than the promo text?