Education Series, Part 1: Why Harry Potter Will Always Be Popular With Children - And It's Not Just About the Wizards

 

Over the last few years in particular there has been an ever growing fight over education in this country. Battles of curriculums that are taught everywhere. Books that school libraries can’t teach any more. The continuing war between public and private school. School board meetings become pitched fights. The recent SCOTUS decision on affirmative action.

Everybody has some thing to say: Democrats, Republicans, talking heads, parents, the media, people who don’t live the state, people who don’t attend the schools. Every single person who has a voice in this fight has been quoted, interviewed or made a tweet. We’ve heard from everybody in America on this subject.

Except, of course, the people who everyone claims that this is about. The children who go to these schools.  I am not surprised by this because for everything we claim to be doing for our children, in reality it is all just another one in a long line of proxy wars that every single group in the world is fighting for through someone else. 

There’s a real reason no one asks a child their opinion on so much of everything that’s going on. And believe me, it only has a vague connection to the fight. No the real reason we don’t ask children about this – even if they are teenagers who will soon be voting – is something that we all seem to forget the moment we graduate any form of education.

No one wants to be in school. Not the worst public school in the inner city to the best private school in Manhattan. Not the charter schools or the religious schools.  No child – from the age of five to the time they graduate high school – wants to be there.

I speak from personal experience. I have always loved reading, I have great skills writing, I can do tough math problems in my head, I know huge amounts of both American History and world history.  I spent my career in public schools and private schools in the inner cities and elite towns. And every moment I was in them, I desperately wanted to be somewhere else. Even in the subjects I found more fascinating – literature and history – I was always reading something else under the desk. Drove all my teachers to distraction. Nor, for the record, was I doing assigned reading at the time: I was almost always reading something else. The fact that it might be heady literature or a historical biography was my habit not that of my teachers.  The fact that I became a well-read, fully literate writer and scholar was not because of my education but in spite of it.(Of course, that’s before I got to college but I’ll save that for a later article.)

 I guarantee you if you were the poll a random group of students in any school – elementary, junior high and high school – and ask them point blank if they liked being in school, ninety to ninety-five percent of them, regardless of gender, race, economic background – would answer in the negative. The ones who answered otherwise are saying it because they see school as a means to an end, usually a scholarship into a better college whether for academic or athletic reasons.

Nobody wants to be in school when they are in it. It’s only when we get older and the passage of time dulls our memory that we remember it with any fondness. This nostalgia factor that is present in any adult has led to so much of our divide, particularly on the right. Both sides, however, tend to see the children as versions of themselves and are trying to direct them on their own path. They constantly make the argument  for these battles as ‘what’s best for the child’ where no student would willing describe any part of the educational system as what they think is best for them.

We have to accept a basic reality about the entire educational system, public or private: at a universal level until we reach college, every aspect of the educational process in America in every form is based on a horribly flawed concept at best and at its worst is just another way that society’s battle are being waged with the most helpless among us. And by that I mean children.

I don’t want to turn this series into a group of polemics. That is something so many people on these sites do and the last thing I want to do is become one. Instead in this series, I will illustrate through cultural, historical – and personal – references as to just why the battles over education in this country are all false flags because none of them dealing with the basic flaw. And to start, I’m going to begin with the most famous educational institution in the last quarter of a century.

 

 

In an article earlier this year I mentioned a documentary on J.K. Rowling. I noted with a certain amusement how there is little doubt the same people who defended her books from attacks about Satanism from the Moral Majority twenty years ago are now attacking her for her position on the transgender community with no awareness of the hypocrisy.

Now I think its worth mentioning that I do not think that regardless of all the controversy that surrounds her now, the original Harry Potter series will ever be in danger of falling out of favor by American children for generations.  For one thing, I genuinely do not believe that the average ten or twelve year old will ever stop reading Harry Potter because grown-ups tell them to: we’re just built that way. But a deeper reason is one that I think is far closer to the appeal to the series among children in American, even if they only realize it on a subconscious level.

I think a part of the reason for the appeal of the Harry Potter series – in particular the first three volumes, which are more designed for children than the remaining four – is that Hogwarts is the school that everybody wishes they could go to. Not because its for wizards and witches, but because it’s a better school than any one of us will ever attend even if schools were the palaces that the left wants them to be.

I am not just talking about the magical elements, though don’t kid yourself that’s not a huge apart of the appeal.  One of the subtler components of Rowling’s work is just how much it tweaks the stuffiness of every element of education. In all of the volumes, the illustrations are always moving and waving. The portraits are in motion and can always talk to you if you need advice or feel lonely.  Sure there’s no technology at all on Hogwarts, but who needs an iPad or an iPhone if you could ask one of the portraits for help with an essay?

What makes Rowling’s work universally appealing – at least in my opinion, and probably to many other readers – is that even though her model must be the equivalent of a British boarding school, she has created so many of the archetypes of the educational experience. There are cliques and divisions within Hogwarts, some of them through sorting houses, some of them by class.  There are bullies, there are know-at-all’s, there are class clowns. There are the crushes you meet when you’re young; they’re the ones you grow up with and fall in love with. And if you’re lucky, you meet a group of people when you’re a child and they become your friends for life. Those who have wanted to ‘cancel Rowling’ because of how she views the world have forgotten she clearly has an understanding of what is like to be a child.

This is also seen, to an extent, throughout the teachers at Hogwarts. Some of them are good at their jobs; some of them are unpleasant and seem to hate you on sight. (I had a foreign language professor in middle school that I can’t help but see as a Snape in training.)  There’s a principal who genuinely seems happy where he is. The teachers all seem invested in helping their charges.

It is in this particular area that we get the part that I think most children want. Because that’s the thing about Hogwarts. All the skills you learn there are skills a student is going to need later in life, even if they don’t know it. Some of them are concentrations you do better in then others but all of them are fundamentally practical when you are becoming a wizard or witch. It is very telling that in the first volume when Harry tells him he’s doing well in the ‘Muggle’ version of school, Hagrid dismisses that what he is learning as useless. Part of this is a clear snobbery between witches and wizards and the ‘mere mortals’  but I think in a sense it appeals to the middle schooler because so many of us have to feel the same way on a daily basis at any school.

Ask yourself this. When was the last time you used algebra? Or diagrammed a sentence? Or had to remember the causes of the War of 1812? So much of what we ‘learn’ on any curriculum is the kind of knowledge that the average teenager forgets by the time they leave high school at the very latest. Because this is a bitter truth that no parent really wants to admit about the educational experience in America: you don’t really need to know any of this to get through your daily life.  Most professionals realize this by the time they get to college.  A parent might do well to remember this when their eighth-grader complains about why they need to learn calculus.

There is also the fact that, with the notable exception of Defense of the Dark Arts, from year to year every class at Hogwarts is taught by the same professor. It is implied without being directly stating that in each successive year you are being taught more advanced studies by in your subject by a teacher who knows what you are able to handle. With the sole exception of the ragging that Snape got I don’t remember any student ever complaining about that from year to year. (There is an exception which I’ll get to in a moment.)

I couldn’t help when I read these books as an adult to find myself wishing for some version of that consistency when I’d been a child.  That level fundamentally disappeared with the one-room schoolhouse but I’m not convinced its been a change for the better.  It’s always difficult for the average child to adjust to learn more complicated fields within a high school or a grade school, particularly in the world where these teachers can often change every semester, if not every year. Maybe if the same science teacher had been teaching me a more advanced version of the subject with each year, I might have been able to accept it better. Consistency is something we tend to treasure in life; having in our educational process might be useful.

Of course, the noted exception at Hogwarts is Magical History. Rowling writes that this subject has been taught by the same professor for decades, and that in fact he died several years ago and just kept on teaching as a ghost. His lectures are monotone and so boring that they are the ones that no student at Hogwarts likes attending. However, given that so many of the problems that happen in the second half of the series are because so many of the adults have not learned from the past, there is a real chance that Rowling did this deliberately. It might be too much to think that she was implying so much of the battles of how history are being taught in places like America and Europe, but she had to be aware of it at the time.

And let’s not kid ourselves that Hogwarts is such a lively place to be. There are feasts and balls and visits to sweet shops with luscious sounding deserts. The most popular outdoor event is a sport where you fly on a broom and there’s lively on-field commentary.  Harry spends his winter breaks there because he has no home to go back to, of course, but I imagine a lot of other children who had perfectly fine ones wanting to spend their vacations there.

The moment the final bell rings at any school, we can’t wait to leave. We’re always counting down – to the end of the day, to the weekend, to the spring break, to summer vacation.  Even when there are extracurriculars we like, we don’t like spending time on school grounds if we don’t have to. The American school experience has basically become one where everyone in it is marking time until they go home. Even those students who may have home lives that are as bad or worse than the Dursleys in American schools would probably rather be anywhere else than their school.

The Harry Potter series will always have appeal in America because for so many young students is wish-fulfillment. They want a school where what they learn will matter when they become an adult. They want their professor to be friendly and a presence in their lives, year after year.  They want a school that is fun to be at and where they’d hate to leave.  But the best schools in the country will never provide that. And that is not a bug in the system: it is the system.

In the next article in the series I will use two little remembered scenes in one of the most iconic 80s teen movies to illustrate how John Hughes had a very clear idea of what school really is.