Much of children’s literature creates fantastical scenarios in which the young protagonists can endure all sorts of danger that reality would never permit. It is the nature of fiction to allow us to do whatever we cannot, and when you’re a child—a point when your suspension of disbelief is at an all-time high—taking advantage of this will never be easier.
But if we stop to consider carefully, reality will eventually clock in. And it’s then when you realize that you would never make it through your education at Hogwarts. Lasting a term would be a miracle. Why do parents send their children here? It’s madness.
I understand that we’re not meant to take certain elements of the series seriously (particularly in the earlier adventures), and that some aspects of the books are engineered to ensure plot development and excitement throughout. But if I’m going to suspend my disbelief for this world, I am going for the whole package. Taking the text as Word One and leaving it there. And with that in mind… Hogwarts is a death trap. They should be sued every year or worse. The psychological scars alone would lead to a lifetime of therapy for anyone with a practical sense of mortality, and that’s without considering the constant threat of wizard war.
Just a few items that children can expect to encounter at the school during their education:
- The most dangerous sport in the world;
- A forest containing murderous species;
- A hidden chamber built by a founder of the school that is linked to the deaths of several former students;
- A tree that can literally beat you;
- Various creatures and curriculum materials that can cause severe bodily harm during classes (textbooks included);
- A poltergeist that regularly assaults the student body.
This short list contains beings, spaces, and items which are always located at the school. Not things brought in by outside forces, but what a student might run into on any given day because they are mainstays of the castle. So we must ask the question again—why would parents allow their children to attend such an institution?
Well, for one, it would seem that world’s magical population is blessed with a certain amount of… flexibility? Springy-ness? The wizarding world has more present danger day to day than the Muggle one, between the dragons and vampires and boggarts and Dark Arts. It forces one to wonder—did wizards adapt to outside dangers or did those outside dangers grow alongside the emergence of magic? Do magical peoples simply accept those dangers because they are so much more likely to encounter them over the course of life? If that’s the case, it makes sense that no one would think twice about encouraging their kid to play for the house Quidditch team, even knowing that accidents are common, injuries severe, and a fall from a broom would be far worse than a playground spill. It’s common to the wizarding experience.
Even young children seem to have instinctual failsafes that keep them out of the danger: one of Harry Potter’s first experiences with magic is a leap he makes onto a roof when he’s being chased by cousin Dudley and his gang of goons. We know that Neville’s family only discovered he had an ounce of magical ability because his great-uncle held him out a window and thoughtlessly dropped him—leading Neville to bounce. (The Longbottom family was lucky the kid didn’t turn out to be a Squib, or they could have been brought up on murder charges, is all I’m saying.) This is more distressing when you remember that the previous family experiment involved Neville being dropped off of Blackpool pier—where he apparently nearly drowned. That lack of regard indicates that peril doesn’t register to the magical community on the same level.
When you add wizarding medicine to that—which seems effectively limitless, at least where physical injuries are concerned—it paints a picture of relative safety. Nothing too out of the ordinary, plus a nice infirmary on the grounds where bones can be regrown as they are needed. Why worry? Everything looks to be in good order, kids are fine, move along…
But potential for injury aside, what Harry and his peers encounter in their time at the school isn’t just troublesome. It’s deadly. On a regular basis. And no one seems to be bothered until Voldemort’s name gets thrown in the ring.
Take year one: Dumbledore announces in his opening speech that the third floor corridor is out of bounds to anyone who does not wish to suffer a most painful death. The announcement itself is interesting, yes, but not the key item here—it’s the student body reaction that we should be looking into. No one (aside from a few dumb First Years who don’t know any better yet) is shocked. Surprised. Put off. Raises their hand to ask a question or voice their concerns. This doesn’t seem new or different from any other year for these kids. Which means that announcements like that probably occur semi-frequently. Don’t go into Classroom H unless you’re immune to sharpened steel! Stay away from the Quidditch locker rooms for the next month while we exterminate our pixie infestation! Don’t open the green box in Professor Sprout’s office unless you’d like a dose of plague… no, the other green box!
And Dumbledore’s warning is not an empty threat, as we soon find out. Neither is the reopening of the Chamber of Secrets, which gets announced via wall graffiti in one of the castle hallways. As soon as that threat appeared, every student should have been sent home, but… yeah, I got nothing. I cannot think of one single reason why school remained in session. This is like how I grew up in the one school district that never got a snow day, and we would watch cars slide across the ice as parents desperately tried to drop their kids off in the morning. It’s just like that, except the threat of a swift demise is more imminent and obvious, and—never mind, it’s nothing like me going to school on a snowy day. It’s much scarier.
Year three we get Dementors! We get prison guards at a school for a whole year because they’re worried about one escaped inmate. You know, whatever they thought Sirius Black might do if he got into Hogwarts, I can’t imagine that it’s worse than subjecting your students to that for a whole year. I know they thought Black wanted to kill Harry, but you know THE DEMENTORS GOT CLOSER TO DOING THAT. See the problem? Every single student should have gotten Patronus training, and that’s not even getting into Harry’s near fatal Quidditch match. You know, the one where the Dementors sauntered onto the pitch and started feasting, thereby reaffirming that Quidditch is a pretty dangerous sport, seeing as Harry probably would have died when he fell off his broom had Dumbledore not intervened.
Should we bother talking about the Tri-Wizard Tournament at this point? Well, why don’t we, just for fun. After the first three years of terror, the Ministry of Magic decides that the best way to encourage magical cooperation across countries isn’t to do an exchange program or a summit or any other logical sort of gathering. They decide to resurrect a tournament that hasn’t been played in over two centuries. Why so long, you ask? Precisely because it was dangerous to pretty much everyone involved. (The 1792 Tri-Wizard Tournament saw the injury of the three judges, all Headmasters of the participating schools.) Kids have died in the tournament, in fact, but once your name gets spat out you’re in it to win it.
Oh, did I forget to explain that part? The part where once you’ve been selected by the Goblet of Fire, you’re stuck in a binding magical contract that forces you to see the tournament through? For some reason you’re allowed to enter into this manner of dangerous contract without the sign-off of a parent or guardian in the first place. (Again, wizard parents don’t seem too concerned.) And instead of calling the whole thing off once fourteen-year-old Harry Potter gets thrown into the ring without his say-so, they just get the year-long circus moving. The challenges are not toned down in order to make the tournament less dangerous, by the way. They are also primarily physical in nature, and rely on contact with magical beings that have no problem eating, drowning, or burning the competitors alive.
Here’s the thing—you could, ostensibly, have the Tri-Wizard Tournament without ever using the Goblet of Fire, couldn’t you? You could draw names from a hat! You could ask the students to nominate and vote on their peers! You could have the Headmasters pick their school champion after a hearty round of debate from the frontrunners! YOU COULD DO LITERALLY ANYTHING BUT THIS.
It’s no wonder that Dumbledore sees nothing wrong with letting children form an army within Hogwarts the very next year. That’s what you need to survive your education, at the very least. When Harry and Co. put their little Dark Arts fighting crew together, the wizened one was probably thinking, “About damn time. One less thing for me to worry about.”
And this is without even considering freak accidents. Ill-advised sojourns too close to the Forbidden Forest. Late-night skinny dipping that leads to a worrisome encounter with mermaids. A trick step on the staircase that you forget just once. Remember everything that scared you when you were fifteen? Now imagine that, plus whatever is intent on eating you in Defense Against the Dark Arts this week. Seven years is a long time, and you’ve got plenty of chances to turn your head away right when a troll emerges during your free period.
But it oddly makes more sense of the wizarding world, considering all of this. It takes a pretty substantial amount of jeopardy for these people to show concern. If they’re willing to let their children attend a school where bodily injury is high on the probability list each day, perhaps it would take them some extra time to heed warnings of Voldemort’s return. Perhaps these students really would feel more isolated and inclined to taking matters into their own hands. It gives these kids reign to be heroes because they exist in a society where their ability to survive is not questioned quite so carefully. They are expected to endure. To bounce.
And of course, none of this means that we don’t want a ticket to Hogwarts tomorrow. It’s just good to remember that the Whomping Willow could take you and all your friends, and still have enough energy to battle a dragon.
This article was originally published in May 2014 as part of the Harry Potter Reread.
Emmet Asher-Perrin figures that boggarts are way more terrifying as an adult, when your greatest fears are much more abstract. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
As an American, I always struggled with the concept of parents not seeing their kids for 9 months of the year for most of their teenage years.
I watched a HISHE “How Harry Potter Should Have Ended” youtube video last night that makes fun of this problem.
https://youtu.be/9G5mG7QHK84
Oh, please. Parents these days mollycoddle their children.
The most dangerous sport in the world;
By whose calculation? The equivalent muggle sport, Polo, is vastly more dangerous. Your broomstick will not attack you (OK, there was that case last year, but it wasn’t the broomstick’s fault; it had been enchanted by another boy who was upset that his girlfriend had jilted him for the Slytherin seeker)
A forest containing murderous species;
There are muggle schools in Australia with more murderous species than that and, for heaven’s sake, the forest is posted as out of bounds!
A hidden chamber built by a founder of the school that is linked to the deaths of several former students;
What’s your problem here? First, there is absolutely not any such chamber. It’s just a myth. Second, well, sure, “several” students have died at Hogwarts, but the school is over 1,000 years old. A few deaths are inevitable! We believe we’ve kept the body count down to extremely reasonable levels.
A tree that can literally beat you;
At chess!
Various creatures and curriculum materials that can cause severe bodily harm during classes (textbooks included);
Look, I went to a muggle school where the chemistry teacher would hand a kid a balloon full of hydrogen and tell him to hold it over the bunsen burner, and dropped peanut sized pellets of sodium into the sink on his desk, so that he could watch the lids blow off all the sinks at the student desks. Face it; high school is a dangerous time of life!
A poltergeist that regularly assaults the student body.
Come on! It’s a little harmless hazing. Please stop overreacting.
One word: agoge
See also Sparta
Why have generations of parents sent their children to Eaton and such, when their history is rife with sexual abuse to the point of it almost being a tradition? People are weird in their ability to willfully disbelieve that facts are relevant to themselves.
I cannot help but think of this article about a school: Yarmouth School
At one point in its history, staff and pupils were physically afraid to go there. No one minded. It was only when the new management tried to make it safer that the protests started.
Or this book, with chapter after chapter describing schools where staff and students were routinely threatened and attacked: On the Edge
No one minded about that either. Children are compelled by force of law to attend them.
So I suppose Wizards are just like Muggles: They don’t care what happens to children, as long as it happens out of sight, and they have deniability.
I personally would take danger — even extreme danger — over mediocrity any day of the week.
It became clear over the course of the books that Wizards have a completely different concept of acceptable risk from Muggles, no doubt because almost anything short of death can be fixed by magic.
You see a lot of near-death experiences, and you think the school is unsafe. I see that with no regard at all for safety, only one child died in 1943, and one in 1995 (far from the school), The deaths in 1998 don’t count since there was a magical war going on; as for the death of the headmaster the year before, a lot of things had to go wrong, plus quite a lot of betrayal, just to allow what was actually assisted suicide. I conclude that Hogwarts wards are indeed as powerful as they say. No matter how high the danger, without a powerful dark magic influence, something is going to happen to prevent the worst.
A related question would be: what kid would want to go to this school?
If memory serves me (based on the movies), Harry had creepy parents who were then murdered, conveniently sidestepping any questions about whether he wanted to be there or not.
As a kid I sought out stories about heroes and about people living in freedom and having adventures of their own. A story about kids being dominated by controlling and judgemental adults would have been about as appealing as reading 1984 (which I gave up on around page 100 when I realized that George and Julia were not going to win, but rather were going to be devoured.)
A lot of it feels like the Wizarding World’s traditionalism at work. “Back in my day we fought the dragon with only half a wand!”, etc, etc – not helped by having all that magical medicine that can essentially heal everything short of death or losing your soul. It is a deeply flawed society.
In general, too, they seem to have a more blase attitude towards risk. Being a wizard/witch is inherently dangerous, I suppose.
I used to say that the wizarding world’s method of education amounted to: you survive, you pass. It’s a method of population control.
Of course, there are so many suspensions of disbelief required by Hogwards that the danger quickly just becomes part of the general tapestry. The scene between the Minister of Magic and the Primer Minister of England comes to mind as a particularly unintentionally ironic moment in the series. Rather than be overwhelmed by the terrible news of Voldemort’s return, the PM should have gotten his security team involved and ordered a targeted strike based on CCTV and spy satellites. If Jack Ryan could find guys in the desert to stop during Patriot Games in 1992, it seems crazy the Brits couldn’t do the same for a single dark lord in one of the most heavily monitored areas of the world circa 2005.
But we accept the parameters of the story in order to enjoy it, or at least get something out of it. I think the longer the series goes on the more it strains credulity in certain areas, mainly because the focus grows more adult and so some things that could have been hand-waived at the start can no longer be ignored, especially in regards to the larger world-building. The stories are best when offering a tight focus on specific characters. Thinking too hard about how a pocket of the British population was completely unaffected by 20th century war is an exercise in futility.
How does this differ from traditional (unsupervised 19th c.) British elite boarding schools? Beatings, child sexual abuse by adults, non-consensual sex between older and younger students, bad food or insufficient amount of food, etc.
@@@@@ 13 – Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. England has never had a Prime Minister; the post only came into existence a little over a decade after the Acts of Union.
Now that is just silly. You can’t murder a squib, you just have a tragic accident which everyone chooses never to openly mention again.
Because it would offer access to means of breathing underwater. I would do anything for that.
A snow day is like a crumple-horned snorkack, I’ve heard people say that it exists, but I’ve never actually seen one myself even though I went to school in both northern China (by which I mean two housess down the street from Siberia) and Canada.
Parents in the US send their kids to schools where they have to continually practice how to hide from and/or delay a mass shooter. They enroll their kids in a sport that often causes substantial brain damage. They continually defund education and strip schools of their resources. Millions of parents take their kids out of public schools and enroll their kids in charter schools with substantially lower requirements for their employees that often have extremely shady reputations.
The incompetence of Hogwarts is the most believable part of the story.
A logical thread, but since we are talking about different cultures (wizards and muggles), we must first look if this alone can logically explain the easiness of sending your children to grow up in a place with dangers.
The western culture is a spoiled and fearful one. there are other cultures in our real world, more likely to be found in Asia and Africa, mayhap in South America and most of all north/southpole, were parents don’t think twice, because 1.) there never was any alternative to choose from, 2.) the children need for their own survival to adjust to dangers to begin with and most important – 3.) since those parents themselves never knew life without dangers, it would never occur to them to try and prevent such a life from their children (so long as they never took a glimpse in the media of the western culture).
We in the “modern” west are afraid of our own shadow (can be interpreted in many ways). We maybe live more safely, more prosperous (sp?), so we should live a more happy life, but those “simple ones” in the East or down South (excluding those living in day by day war or plague) are by far happier with their simple life. We suffer mentally much more then them. with our need for pills and psychiatrists, and so on. We are strongly addicted people (and I don’t mean drugs), addicted to our material world, and social status, so we live in fear of loosing it every day. So growing up in those other cultures makes you more “free” of those limitations. You can say the same about dangers/health issues in Hogwarts, or the magical culture for that. The less you fear of breaking a bone or two, the more you can stand up and live by your values when someone/something dangerous tries to dictate your life. It sounds tough, but it’s in the long run mentally healthier.
Parents in the US send their kids to schools where they have to continually practice how to hide from and/or delay a mass shooter.
Well, quite. And at least Hogwarts only has Dementors for one year, to handle (what was thought to be) a really unusual, specific and severe danger to its students. Thousands of US schools have armed guards all the time. (And occasionally they shoot people by accident due to incompetence. Normally themselves.)
And, as comment 10 points out, the actual number of fatalities at the school is very low. Two violent deaths of students in the last sixty years (and only one actually happening on school grounds)! There are many schools in major cities – not just US cities, either – that would be delighted to have only two violent deaths in the last year.
I appreciate that this is a lighthearted article, but it may help to consider all of Hogwarts to be a lovely satire of a sort of boarding school aristocracy and establishment ruddy cheeked middle-England-ness that follows the tradition of the Gulliver’s Travels series and the stories of Flashman.
When one of your favourite boarding school sports is rugby, polo is played in some rarefied schools and most older schools have more abandoned garrets, hidey holes and inglenooks than you can shake a stick at, then this all seems a little bit more proportionate. Also, less light of heart, consider the British attitude to the suicides and deaths in the Army training corps as a benchmark that might be a little illuminating on the subject of carrying on regardless.
Finally, I would also point out that Pratchett’s Guild of Assassins is very much in a similar vein and just as pointedly satirical.
“Late-night skinny dipping “
In Scotland? Other than in the summer?
I mentioned several times during the reread that if Hogwarts were real the Division of Child and Family Services would’ve been all over that place.
With great risk comes great reward; it’s that same message writ large on the page. But yes, looked at as pure realism, all the points made here are valid. And there’s scarcely any fantasy world I’d care to visit when you start putting it that way.
Also, less light of heart, consider the British attitude to the suicides and deaths in the Army training corps as a benchmark that might be a little illuminating on the subject of carrying on regardless.
And as a foreign civilian with no military experience, you’re certainly in the best position to know.
While yes, the perils of a wizarding school are substantially more than a muggle one, you have to remember that they also have the great equalizer: magic. Hogwart’s nurse has tonics that can regrow bones, plants that cure petrification, bird tears that cure any poison or injury. What could be a serious, life-threatening injury anywhere in the muggle world is a nightly stay in the infirmary in the wizarding world. So yeah, wizard parents are a little harder to scare than muggle ones. It takes a lot to keep a wizard down.
The most surprising thing is that any of them thought Voldemort had actually been killed to begin with.
Muggles send their kids to schools where they may be shot (either individually or in a group), stabbed, raped/abused, subjected to racist/sexist/homophobic/… treatment, have easy access to addictive drugs, poisonous chemicals, and so forth, operate fatally dangerous machinery, and that’s before we even start talking about football.
Also, adolescence is meant to be a time of gradually increasing responsibility (and risk), and high schoolers aren’t exactly “children.” (First years at Hogwarts are another matter.)
Sometimes it’s a bummer to be an adult and read books as an adult. :) But this is all well considered. The Ministry of Magic must have some seriously impressive wizarding lawyers.
@17 AeronaGreenjoy: Hah. Between this and your comments on my Tolkien posts, I’m now fully convinced you work for some sort of biogenetics company trying to create actual mer-people. :)
Come on people. Have you never heard of fantasy? How many times have our children ( ourselves included) lived through the likes of Wizard of Oz ( flying monkeys take you away to the witch’s castle where you can wait for death while the hourglass spills out the time you have left) & every other Disney movie from Sleeping Beauty, to Cinderella, etc.
Hogwarts is well-protected, & the students that have died there are few & far between. And as far as that is concerned, people do die in real life & eventually our children will have to face that. The stories don’t dwell on those deaths & more people are saved than not. If we take the fantasy aspect from our children’s lives, it would be a pretty dull place.
I never thought about this until I started having kids awhile back. Then I really thought it through when I watched the movies with my kids. Definitely seemed like a free range, latch key approach. Like three separate worlds. The adults/ministry, the kids, and then the higher level game with Dumbledore and Voldemort using Harry as a pawn.
I went to a relatively tame boarding school where nobody died and there where no dragons, multi-headed dogs, or giant basilisks but there were some teachers that seemed possessed and definitely some trolls in the bathrooms.
Emily,
One thing you didn’t mention. Any student can put their name in the hat for the potentially deadly Tournament; any student can try out for Quidditch, take classes where the textbooks and the lab projects bite but you need a signed note from a parent to go into town for a day?
Michelle R. Wood @13:
What makes you think that surveillance technology works against Potterverse magic, when there is every reason to assume that it doesn’t? Statutes of Secrecy couldn’t have endured in the face of CCTVs otherwise.
And yea, I feel that JKR ommitting WW2 from the narrative background was a missed opportunity because it could have actually given the Death Eaters and those who didn’t actively oppose them a real reason to support/tolerate that ideology. If a lot of British wizards did die in the Blitz because they didn’t follow Muggle politics were unprepared for the bombings, there could have been an understandable motivation for the movement, instead of just Voldy’s cult of personality or whatever. Potterverse depiction of what amounts to nationalistic terrorism and the atmosphere in which it can grow and flourish was lamentably dumbed down instead of helping the kids to understand how the real thing comes about in an age-appropriate way. Which wouldn’t have made the books any less entertaining and might have possibly even improved them, BTW. Just like the aknowledgement that the world outside Great Britain existed. Oh, well.
Oh, and I guess that it is no wonder that although the wizards are ostensibly supposed to have longer life-spans than Muggles, in praxis Neville was the only one with a living grandparent. They tend to live dangerously and die young. Which starts with Hogwarts.
the-schwartz-be-with-you @20:
I think that “the simple societies” are being idealized. There is a lot of horrific abuse going on under the surface in them, without the benefit of psychological treatment. And the notion that worry about having enough to eat that you and your family can survive is less of a stress than the pressures of modern society is questionable.
OTOH, it is true that we are too fearful about the kids nowadays – yet it is in large part due to the truth of all of the abuse going on during “the good old days” coming out. And make no mistake – many (most?) of the victims didn’t get over this, they were damaged for life and in some cases perpetuated the cycle.
@28: I wish. Even when working at the New England Aquarium, I was intensely dissatisfied with my landlocked lot. On second thought, I might not actually want to create aquatic humanoids if I couldn’t be one. Except gollums. I would still want to create gollums.
Really, I think the dangers presented to the youth of Wizarding families at Hogwarts have been exaggerated out of proportion by the reporter of this article. There are seven film documentaries recording life in a typical Muggle girls high school from 1954 to 2009 which show clearly that the mundane life is much more dangerous. I refer of course to the well known St Trinians series.
[A St Trinians-Hogwarts student exchange would be … interesting]
@34
We should talk, give me your telephone number and I’ll give you a ring.
A majority of the problems can be summed up in this phrase: The wizards employ a lot less overt violence but they make up for it with a lot of institutionalized cruelty.
This is a more or less general ramble in response to the original post and comments and my own thoughts …
I figure the parents all went through it too, so they don’t care – they survived it. It’s like any self-perpetuating system of abuse. Those who survive it enforce it on the next generation.
And that’s not even getting into the castle itself with its ever shifting floor plan which makes it far too easy to fall eight floors onto the hard ground. Some people like to say the castle is sentient. Really, if it is, it has a terrible sense of humor. And the spirit of Hogwarts is not one that cares about anything but its own entertainment.. Sounds suspiciously like Peeves. Peeves as the ‘spirit of Hogwarts’ explains so much about why a potentionally living castle school of magic would allow even half of what goes on within its walls.
For that matter, has anyone ever seen Peeves outdoors? No, we haven’t.
I do wonder about Filch, and his predecessor(s). The two we hear about are sadists. What’s with that? And why have them at all, given house elves? (ignoring the probable answer that Rowling didn’t think up house elves till after she had Filch.)
On normal surveillance catching wizards – what makes anyone think they understand technology enough to block it, or even spot it? honestly, I can think of one wizard who seems to be able to blend in with normals: Shacklebolt. None of the others show any hint of understanding or caring about such stuff. And even if they grasp local surveillance mechanisms it’s hard to imagine they could hide from the gps satellites. (yeah, I know, the everyone-access version weren’t available when #1 was written and set.) They’d be caught eventually.
What concerns me in the canonical books (ignoring everything but the 7 volumes because that’s all I know) is that the kids essentially run feral: the adults aren’t guiding them at all. Certainly not the Gryffindors, and there are hints Ravenclaws are the same (the bullying of Luna). And one dorm is hated and feared by apparently all (although I do remember we’re seeing through a Harry filter) and no one does a thing to change attitudes.
Possibly related: it’s sorely understaffed.
There’s the Forbidden Forest. you know, my grammar school had a forbidden forest (really a grove) but we weren’t supposed to go into it. We did anyway and took our punishment. At least mine was fenced. The one at Hogwarts doesn’t even have that simple attempt at protection. Apparently Hagrid is supposed to catch anyone trying to go there and stop them. Hagrid is one person, and the forest is large. This works? Really?
Detention for being out after hours is being out after hours in the Forbidden Forest. uh-huh. Can we say (at minimum) mixed messages? And not get into the adult splitting the kids up in this dangerous place.
Letting an acromantula colony grow. Man-eating giant spiders right next to a school. In the Forest where there is just one person responsible for keeping kids out. We certainly don’t see any other protections. I know late in the series Snape says Hogwarts does have protections. They don’t keep out acromantula, dragons (Hagrid’s), and dark objects like the diary and tiara (or Voldie himself). No one – except Percy – notices anything’s going on with Ginny, either.
Along the lines of the Forest, announcing a death trap within the school guarding it with a weak lock spell (first years can get in) and not expecting kids to poke at it? We normal kids got into forbidden places, wizard kids wouldn’t? And everyone merrily goes along with Dark Lord bait and ‘protections’ that wouldn’t stop the former head boy (Tom) for a minute.
Then there’s the personnel management. A teacher is known to have tried to harm a student (Quirrel at the first quidditch match) and he’s allowed to remain in his position. Lousy DADA teachers when the guy in charge is certain there’s another ‘war’ coming. Even allowing for a possible magical contract wherein the headmaster is not allowed to fire teachers unless they have violated specific terms spelled out in it, which is the only potential excuse I can come up with for letting Quirrel have the DADA job after he came back with Voldemort attached to his head.
In book 3, employing Lupin and not asking him for knowledge of how Sirius was getting in. Snape was really mad about this.
Sirius does get in, and the adult in charge of Gryffindor, punishes a kid by blocking him from safety – such as it is – in the dorm.
Students attempt murder and get off without meaningful penalty. Tom killed Myrtle, Dumbledore knew, and did nothing. And Hagrid, whom everyone thinks killed Myrtle, is allowed to stay around – WITH his murdering beastie, too. Then Sirius and Snape, and Malfoy in this generation. Dumbledore to Malfoy in book six: (rummage in the book) “No harm has been done, you have hurt nobody, though you are very lucky that your unintentional victims survived” . uh-huh.
@37 Elaine T,
I’m a fan of Tolkien and not Rowling, so perhaps my comments will not seem helpful here. But to my mind a real hero in this story would not only destroy Voldemort, but also put an end to this Wizard’s School and to magic itself, if possible. This school is just going to breed young Sarumans.
#38 yeah, really the best case would be little Sarumans.
The older I get, the less I like Rowling’s world.
@@@@@33 isilel – touchee.
38@@@@@ + 39@@@@@ – Of course you are just right. But tell me, why do we read fantasy novels to begin with? My brother for example loves novels, but can’t stand all this “fantasy crap” , he methodically explains how it is just not logical from several different angles/point of view , and sums it up , that if it’s not fiction based on our real world, it’s not worth exploring.
But that’s not us, we love those surreal worlds, because, we want to experience (only as a reader from a safe distance) those dangerous adventures in those excotic plantes with them excotic creatures using some excotic powers, and so on…
Of course those novels would have to be based on logic for it to work, but I don’t see JK screwing that up.
If there are no high stakes, it is less likely to get emotional on so many levels. And HP made my tough manly grown up self shed some tears. A rare feat and I congratulate JK for managing it.
@40,
I read fantasy and sf not because I am fascinated by flying dragons and warp drive, but rather to find stories about people operating away from the usual social paradigms of the pursuit of money and power, or else endless hand-wringing over how to control and manipulate the kids or other family members. I enjoy Tolkien and Star Trek because to a certain extent they portray people behaving with respect and nobility. I enjoyed Kung Fu because it portrayed someone seeking to some extent to live with an attitude of reverence and humility. And I valued certain moments in The Walking Dead which showed certain people having the courage to see how evil some others in their world had become, and to stop making decisions on the basis of wishful thinking. In other words I am interested in examples of character – while what mainstream society offers is mainly a series of deceitful poses.
@41 I agree with you and that is also one of my reasons for loving fantasy, just that with my previous reason I adressed the previous posts being let down with HP having to many dangerous adventures… which in my opinion is the basic fundament of what makes fantasy novels. If Dan Brown’s novels would lack that logic, then the critic would be on point. but HP? wrong genre to critic on being not realistic enough.
@42,
Ah yes, I see what you mean. That’s like saying “I don’t like stories where people make up stuff that didn’t really happen.”
:-)
@38-42: I think the original article was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but the discussion has become rather serious since.
Harry Potter is a children’s adventure story. As such, it must solve the same problem as every other children’s adventure story, namely how to justify that the youthful heroes do adult tasks and get into serious danger. This is traditionally done by making the adults in the story abusive, incompetent, or absent, or by making the young hero the Chosen One. Faced with the choice between these alternatives, Rowling chose them all. And it works. Well, mostly.
As children’s adventure stories go, it’s first-class. But I don’t see it in the same league as Tolkien or Star Trek. (I haven’t watched Kung Fu in a long time. Perhaps I should?)
@44janajansen,
Quote “Harry Potter is a children’s adventure story. As such, it must solve the problem as every other children’s adventure story, namely how to justify that the children do adult tasks and get into serious danger. This is traditionally done by making the adults in the story abusive, incompetent, or absent, or by making the young hero the Chosen One.”
Wow, that was incredibly well said, and something I hadn’t thought of.
Unschooling parents who allow their children a great deal of freedom and independent decision-making frequently get accused of being precisely “abusive, incompetent, or absent (neglectful)”.
Children solve this problem by reading adult adventure stories. But of course besides the main adventure, there are also many quieter moments that make a story interesting, and I suppose that HP, being a story that features many children, must have a number of these that would be of special interest to them. I haven’t read the novels; I’ve only seen the movies.
Although I enjoyed the Kung Fu series, I’m not sure how much can be gained from a second viewing. There is an episode with William Shatner that is entertaining just for that reason, although it probably wasn’t one of the better episodes in other respects.
@44/JanaJansen: Calling the Potterverse “a children’s adventure story” seems a bit reductive, but your broader notion does raise an important point that too often gets left behind in these sorts of discussions: fictional worlds are built to serve the stories in which they appear; plausibility and consistency are only applied to the extent needed to prevent taking the reader/viewer out of the story. Perusing the discussions on this site regarding the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, the MCU, etc. show that Rowling is hardly unique in having created a world that can break down when you start poking at it too deeply.
Tolkien seems a notable exception here, but in a way that actually further illustrates the point: his legendarium is somewhat unique in that much of it existed, for the amusement of himself and his family, before he started writing LotR. Yet the discussions of The Silmarillion and Middle-earth’s geography on this very site also reveal that even that meticulously crafted world isn’t immune to inconsistencies and flaws either.
As for the original topic of the post…perhaps sending kids to Hogwarts serves the same function in the wizarding world as elite prep schools and universities serve in ours: virtue signalling. Simply getting through 6 or 7 years at Hogwarts with your life and (at least most of) your limbs intact appears to signal at least a basic level of competence.
It’s fun to pick it apart, is part of it. I do enjoy the books, when I pick them up again, although sometimes I wonder why. And there’s craft questions (for me, and my kid who writes and we talk a lot).
I think it is worth pointing out that Magical Britain only has a population of a few thousand people – about the same as the average English Parish. The whole magical world probably only has the population of a single county. The students in Dumbledore Army were not preparing to fight Sauron the Great, Lord of Mordor and Master of the Nazgul. They were preparing to fight Tom Riddle, a man who got himself killed while failing to take over something about the size of a parish council. So treat him with appropriate disrespect.
My comment apparently got eaten. Anyway… The characters in the books are presented as terrified of Tom Riddle, Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named and break the secrecy rules celebrating his demise. I don’t think it can be plausibly argued that he was small potatoes, worthy of disrespect.
Personally, I do think he was. I just don’t see Rowling presenting it that way. So justifying lack of prep against him as he’s a small time gang leader doesn’t work based on what’s in Rowling.
@Elaine T – my post in @40 was ment for @38+@39 not for you @37, I edited it to fit my comment. your comment was a thorough one which I enjoyed. And I agree, Voldy is no small potatoes. Maybe for Gandalf or the dexterous Legolas, but for humans and even wizards who are mostly innocent and non violent in JK’s books, Voldy is dangerous on a national scale.
How can you compare Star Trek to HP? I never saw real depth in the characters and their growing relationship. (Star Tek fans out there be gentle with me here…) Star Trek is lots of fun, but it’s a different style altogether to be compared to HP
@45/Keleborn Telperion: Thank you!
Not being from the US, I had never heard of “unschooling” before, even though I have read a lot of books about Summerhill School. After reading your comment, I looked it up on the Internet. Interesting. People have sometimes told me that I allow my children too much freedom and independent decision-making myself, although not to that degree (which would be illegal in my country anyway). So far it works out.
I watched the Kung Fu series as a child and hardly remember it. I do remember that I liked it, and that in itself is unusual, because usually I don’t like westerns.
@50/the-schwartz-be-with-you: “How can you compare Star Trek to HP? I never saw real depth in the characters and their growing relationship.” – Well… others did :-). And of course, character relationships are not the only thing a story is about. Much of the fascination with Star Trek is about the optimistic future, and the social commentary on real-world issues; much of the fascination with HP is about the worldbuilding (I think). Not that there isn’t some social commentary in Rowling’s works too.
@51 JanaJansen , thanks for not ripping my head of. “Much of the fascination with Star Trek is about the optimistic future, and the social commentary on real-world issues; much of the fascination with HP is about the worldbuilding (I think). Not that there isn’t some social commentary in Rowling’s works too.” as you say Star Trek and HP are from the core different, so comparison is as an overview not really possible in my opinion.
@52/The.Schwartz.be.with.you: Yes, that’s true. And anyway, waltzing into a Harry Potter discussion thread and saying that something else is better wasn’t my best behaviour, so I’m sorry.
When I called Harry Potter a children’s adventure story, I didn’t mean to dismiss it. I can see that it’s something very unusual, namely a book series for a maturing audience. The first book is a children’s story in the tradition of Diana Wynne Jones, Roald Dahl, and every school story ever written. But as the characters grow older, the scope gradually widens. In the end, we’ve met an adult resistance group, politicians, the British Prime Minister, and even looked at the wise old mentor in a different light. I don’t know of any other book series that has attempted something similar.
@53, there are other series that do, but none I can think of in SFF. The two that come to mind immediately are Anne of Green Gables and Betsy-Tacy books which all take the characters from rather young children to adulthood and marriage and IIRC beyond. A they grow, the scope widens, larger issues are dealt with.
@54 Yes! Rilla of Ingleside wouldn’t be the first Anne book to start with for an elementary-aged child, and in fact I was grown before I read the Anne books. I was fourteen when I first read a Betsy-Tacy book and started with Betsy and the Great World (my mom saw it on the library shelf and handed it to me) which ends with the beginning of the same events that Rilla of Ingleside covers.
@51 Social commentary in Rowling’s works . . . that’s why the Potter series is on my Handbooks to Resistance list (along with the Bible, The Long Winter, and The Origins of Totalitarianism), and the social commentary is particularly noticeable in OaP and DH, to me.
@44: You can solve the questions of why the adults leave the children risk their lives on their adventures by having the hero come from a background in which it’s normal for children to be semi-independent; in which case you can fault the parents for not being there for their child, since it’s not the norm for their society. But if you want to make the hero relatable by giving them a normal childhood with living parents, it’s hard to have them be good parents, unless you make them disappear and their rescue becomes the main drive for the hero, e.g. Coraline. But then, society should intervene to take care of the child; the only reason it doesn’t happen in Coraline is because the action goes so fast that no one notices the parents have gone missing.
One book I’ve seen that goes through all the classic steps of the children adventure story (normal childhood, child discovers they’re special and goes to a special school and faces terrible dangers but ultimately saves the day) with proper adult support was Interworld. In there, the school (students and staff) is made of doubles of the hero of various ages, so they are well positioned to know exactly how much they can push the children without having them suffer from the abuse. They all know the multiverse will suffer if they don’t give their all, and that no one else can do it in their stead, which justifies the danger despite the mean age of the students. The hero gets a chance to see his parents again, and they realise what he’s doing is important so they ask him to be careful, and they tell him they will be proud of him whether he stays with them or returns to the school to save everyone. It was not exactly good, but at least I enjoyed the fact that the hero was not completely abandoned.
But still, JK made such a lovely adorable place loved by us fans wolrdwide I think you can find to many who would still enlist to Hogwarts. The dangers are for some another thrill, and for others a price willing to pay in order to enter that world.
Why send your children to Hogwarts?
Tradition? ‘I lived through it, you will too’? Thinly veiled filicidal impulses?
A lot is explained by the first Voldemort war. Dumbledore and his allies vs the Death Eaters: they all believed that a Voldemort War II would either kill or enslave to the whims of the mad dictator or kill all the Death Eaters. Dumbledore used Harry as bait and shaped him as a force to kill Voldemort, knowing that if he didn’t kill Voldemort that Voldemort would hunt down and kill Harry and all his friends. There was no choice. Running serious risks at least provided the possibility of survival outside enslavement.
WW II is definitely there in the background of the first Voldemort War. In the second war, the arrest of the Mudbloods mimics Hitler’s treatment of those found to be of fractionally Jewish heritage — similar propaganda also. Also in Churchill’s conviction that Britain would either defeat Hitler or be destroyed and its people enslaved. Given those choices, any action was justified. Dumbledore’s actions can’t be justified in peace time. In a time of a war to the death? References to WW II abound in HP
I’ll also comment that ideas about child safety evolve and we are now in an era of extremely protective, helicopter parents. Here in America today, parents have police and child protective services called on them for ‘free-range parenting’, which often is a tame version of the life my friends and I lived in middle-class, small-city America, circa 1960. We didn’t have adult supervision as we organized our own play, biked to fields to play ball, and were just expected home for lunch, dinner, and dark. We all lived. Today there is a lot of bullying and actual gang violence in the schools I attended. Many kids fear going to school. They still go every day. The parents generally have little choice but to send them.
@60,
They had a choice about whether to have them, and to consider whether they were ready and able to provide a healthy environment for their children to grow up in.
If that sounds callous, I’ll acknowledge that things have gotten difficult, and for many it will seem grievous to pass on having children until some future time when they might be in a better position to do so. But look at what the alternative is. Active shooter drills and constant testing? Ugh.
I personally have always subscribed to the theory of the “storyteller middleman” wherein the author/creator is only reporting the story in a particular way to the selected audience because the author believes this will 1) engage the audience the most and/or 2) be most accessible to the audience. The original story itself may have unfolded (possibly in an alternate dimension?) completely differently. So Hogwarts always has moving stairs because this seemed most interesting to JKR, but actually the moving staircase thing could have been an isolated incident meant to even protect a student from entering an out-of-hours area. Everything JKR wrote could have been exaggerated from the reality of the story. Imagine a TV show or movie based on a real event. They always change stuff for dramatic purposes, don’t they?
This is not to say that JKR didn’t create her world. She just chose to report it in a particular way. (You can commence stoning me now.)
As someone whose daughter is about to turn Hogwarts-aged, this.
Were she to encounter one tenth of the crap those kids experience, I’d be in Dumbledore’s office tearing him a new orifice DAILY.
@64, would you even know? Hogwarts wizard parents went there themselves and consider the dangers normal. I suspect Muggle parents never hear about them at all because their little wizards know how they’d react.
@65: No need to ‘suspect’ on that count, for Dean Thomas helpfully lampshades the attitude of Muggle-borns in OotP:
@66, Ah yes, I remember that.
That would be like asking, “Why send your kids to public school, because of all of the school shootings happening?” Point being, that there is some danger in every situation. Also, Almost all of the danger was toward Harry and his closest friends. You must also recognize the cultural aspect of it. Magical folk probably deal with dangerous things on a daily basis. For example, Ron’s oldest brother works with dragons. Meaning. they are used to the dangers of the magical world and know how to handle those kinds of situations. Also magical folk are much more capable and more powerful than muggles, so they are more capable to handle more dangerous situations.