When the child was first questioned one could have assumed that here was the devil in juvenile form. In fact in the end one really does not know where the child will lead his interrogator after he has been discovered as a genius. As I understand it Shiras wrote “In Hiding” with the idea of gradually undressing the main character in front of his questioner.

It was nothing to scare your pants off and yet the intrigue caused an odd friendship to form between the analyst and his young patient who in the beginning was very shy to talk about any work that the boy was involved in. At first the work started around the experimentation of mixing two breeds of cats and raise a variety that the boy suspected existed. Those experiments were taboo for the older generation and the author successfully runs the idea of what other knowledge was restricted along with the fact that gradually the child is able to win his investigator over to his side.

 In my opinion the success of the story to reveal just enough about how the child grew up and under what conditions his older relatives restricted his education so that the reader would wonder how affected the boy would be and how human he was. The quirky way his grandparents would manage the growing up would not be enough though to keep the boy from learning underground and as the story progressed, the reader becomes curious as to how much information was obtained and the nature of what the boy knew.

There would be nothing wrong for the boy to know as much as he did and in fact today he public is well aware of child prodigies who are allowed to emerge without parent hindrance. The aspect of the unknown and forbidden knowledge is what would still be intriguing today. The story raises thoughts of how pedogical norms have advanced over the years but there have been restrictions in how much  child was allowed to learn. By extending the thought of educational channels being off limits for the boy,one wonders how in fact institutions have been keeping potentially bright students from succeeding outside the limits they have imposed.