Sharpe's Opinion

Hogwarts is a Terrible School

Link-Blogging resumes! And does so in style, with an absolute cracker from OverthinkingIt.com, who reckon that The Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters provides a much more rounded education than Hogwarts:

Consider for a moment what happens to Hermione Granger when that owl drops off her acceptance letter. Her parents send their only child off to a boarding school they’ve never seen, with a curriculum that disqualifies her from every job they’ve ever heard of. And when she gets back for the summer, she can’t even show them a single spell (students can’t use magic outside of school). J.K. Rowling was once asked how the Grangers feel about Hermione. She said, ‘They are a bit bemused by their odd daughter but quite proud of her all the same.’ Bemused? They must have been devastated. Their kid is abruptly indoctrinated into a secret society they can never be a part of. Can their side of the family even be invited to her wedding?

When you get on that train to Hogwarts, you leave the human world behind… for good. The books portray that as an exciting thing; I say it’s a bittersweet journey, at best.

By comparison:

Xavier’s school isn’t primarily about teaching mutants to use their powers. It’s first and foremost a school. Students also learn to control their powers, and some even learn to fight bad guys. But you don’t go to the Xavier School for superhero training. You go to get an education. Xavier wants to offer his students a choice: “Rejoin the world as an educated young woman or stay on to teach others. To become what the children have affectionately called X-Men.”

Also, there’s the general air of big state socialism in the wizarding community at large:

Most wizards and witches become government bureaucrats. The Ministry of Magic is by far the largest employer in the wizarding world. Other vocations seem few and far between. Ron has a brother who works with dragons. There’s at least one newspaper you could write for. There are a handful of pro Quidditch players. But basically, wizards don’t seem to live interesting lives. For all their phenomenal powers, they have little choice but to work in a cubicle, probably decorated with magical moving Dilbert comics.

Admittedly, I’ve argued the sociological message of Harry Potter from the opposite point of view before (Harry being an individualist hero who shuns both the bureaucratic ministry and the allegoric nationalist racism of the Death Eaters) but Overthinking It provide an excellent case for the Wizarding-As-Socialism camp.

So, the moral is that the best way to make socialism work is using magic. And even then, it’s boring. And the schools are rubbish.

UPDATE: Some more on the politics of Potter here