Quote of the day:

[conuly]

Between Hogwarts and Tom Brown's Schooldays, most have an experience rather more like Hogwarts or Mallory Towers than the abusive boarding school dogma which is floating around here.

Hogwarts, where Harry nearly dies at least once per school year, and where canonical punishments have included traipsing about in acromantula-infested forests all night and having your pet toad potentially murdered? God, I hope boarding school's not like that IRL.

As for Mallory Towers, what I see in those books is that the main characters bully others with impunity, but that's okay because the kids who get bullied all bring it on themselves anyway. Charming message.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

There's no way that JKR wasn't aware of Gordonstoun, famously grim boarding school in the Scottish highlands that Prince Charles was sent to, and where traipsing around in acromantula-infested forests all night sounds like a very plausible punishment. (Not that JKR was basing her writing on real boarding schools, of course, but the grim stuff at Hogwarts is right in line with exaggerating grim reality as well as grim fiction.)

[conuly]

Well, they've apparently gotten somewhat softer in the past few years. Baths are no longer cold! (Perhaps they're tepid?)

[poliphilo]

I was at a boarding school- a good boarding school- as boarding schools go- but it's not an experience I chose to inflict on my own kids.

I think it's wrong to separate children from their parents at such a young age.

[conuly]

That's the argument made in the article this comment is replying to, that even if the school is well-run and really doesn't have any bullying or child abuse, it's still not great to remove kids from home, especially prior to adolescence.

[jack]

My theory for why Hogwarts got away with such dangerous stuff while not seeing more openly dystopian used to be that the healing was better, so it was less risky to get seriously injured. (After all, some but-not-all of the most dangerous things did specifically happen to Harry because of Wizard Hitler the Second, not because they were normal.)

But OTOH, I don't know why I always find myself trying to find explanations when I know lots of people suffered through horrendously grim boarding schools in real life and some of them died or were traumatised for decades, and a lot muddled through mostly coping.

[author_by_night]

Also, the magical world is dangerous, and I imagine they figure kids ought to "get used" to that. Plus, I think that Wizarding society is meant to be decidedly Victorian in a lot of respects. They use quills instead of pens, for instance. So it makes sense that their teaching approach would be more Victorian than modern. My question is, what about Muggle kids who aren't prepared for that?

[conuly]

They die. It's a good thing Neville wasn't a squib, or he wouldn't've bounced.

...god, Neville needs to seriously distance himself from his toxic relatives. Actually, I don't think much of any canon families except maybe Narcissa Malfoy. (Lucius loses points for being awful that time in Knockturn Alley, and for wanting to send his kid to Durmstrang. I'm giving them a pass on letting Draco join the Death Eaters, by that point I don't think they had much choice.)

[conuly]

Snape nearly murdered Trevor! He did nothing but be Neville's hapless pet!

[jack]

Oh yeah. Snape is the main example of "yes, there's teachers that abusive in the real world, and head teachers who let it happen, my brain just keeps sliding off the thought."

And I guess the same for Dumbledore allowing it: even amongst people who wouldn't DO things like that, the attitude has (maybe? hopefully?) shifted from an assumption that there'll just always be teachers like that, to an assumption that it's not ok. But Hogwarts is old-fashioned like that. Which I tend to see more as a wordlbuilding hole of JKR not really questioning why teachers like that can exist, but I understand why some people view as a moral failing on Dumbledore's part.

[wpadmirer]

EGADS.

[conuly]

Mm-hm.

[oursin]

Yeah: some while ago I was re-reading an Angela Brazil jolly-schoolgirls romp that I remembered from my childhood, and looked up from Our Heroine policing The Way We Do Things In This Here School and said to myself, 'In a few years time, my dear, you will be marching with Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts'.

[conuly]

Could be worse. Was just reading a synopsis of a school book, about a public day school in the US, where a girl was considered rude because she didn't wear her hair like the other girls.

[antisoppist]

Malory Towers is where your delightful fellow students slap you and push you in the swimming pool. I didn't think it horrific when reading it as a child because at the same time our father was telling us entertaining stories of all the things prefects beat him for at boarding school. It warps your ideas of what ought to be normal.

[conuly]

Malory Towers is where your delightful fellow students slap you and push you in the swimming pool.

And relentlessly bully you, and then wonder why you never changed to become "better", that is, more like them. And where no misbehavior, committed by a non-protagonist, is minor enough to not be condemned as "disgusting" or "despicable" by literally everybody else.

[pebblerocker]

Practically all Enid Blyton books involve children who need to "have the corners knocked off them" so they'll become normal like the good kids. I remember the Six Cousins books, where one of the boys was a sissy who liked poetry and had to learn to be properly manly and play rugby. The implications are horrific.

[redbird]

I haven't read Mallory Towers, but the only in-world justification I can think of for how Hogwarts treats the students is that the teachers think of it as a wizarding-world West Point or Sandhurst, and would rather lose 10% of the students (to death, injury, or PTSD) now than lose half or even all of them in the war they expect any day now. (This explanation is probably influenced by A.J. Hall's "Lust over Pendle" AU fanfics.) That wouldn't make it ethical, though, and doesn't fit with the series of incompetent teachers for Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Yeah, PTSD, the sort that leads survivors of abusive parents to argue that being beaten didn't harm them and won't harm their own children, and survivors of hazing to mistreat the next group of fraternity pledges.

I wonder, suddenly: is part of the appeal of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that there's no mention of schooling, and children and childhood are almost entirely off-stage beyond the mention that hobbit children are very hungry.

[conuly]

That wouldn't make it ethical, though, and doesn't fit with the series of incompetent teachers for Defense Against the Dark Arts.

That's the curse. Though, really, the other teachers could've done more to pick up the slack there.

[jack]

The curse is one of the things that fascinates me about the worldbuilding. A lot of HP is fairly mechanical or based on skill: point, incant, whoosh. But some needs specific strength of will.

Why didn't Voldemort curse the Headmaster's position? Was that harder to do? Or does it only work if the curse FEELS deserved to you? Or did he just not think of it? I mean, ok, most of the time, JKR just didn't think of it, but I think it's still interesting to ask when the worldbuilding did work well and try to break down why.

[conuly]

Because if he'd cursed the Headmaster's position, Dumbledore would've been out of work and the structure of the books would've been vastly different.

In-story, probably because he's incredibly short-sighted when it comes to his personal vendettas. He wasn't denied the position of Headmaster, he was denied the position of DADA teacher, therefore that's the position he cursed. It's stupid and predictable and petty and doesn't really help him achieve his goals - but this is the same dude who hid all his horcruxes in super-duper meaningful places rather than just picking random spots on a map.

[redsixwing]

That was definitely part of the appeal of The Hobbit for me as a smol. It's an adventure story, and that's appealing in itself - but also, there is no school, and the narrative does not support cruelty to, or by, the main characters.

[movingfinger]

I have tried reading the Mallory Towers stories, but I found them unpleasant in just this way. They seem to appeal mostly to a particular class sentimentalism and an ability to identify with the Right Set.

[conuly]

Also, Enid Blyton has no respect for her reader's intelligence.

[hilarita]

I'm sure Neville Longbottom would disagree about Hogwarts. Until Fred and George left, that is. And Mallory Towers is, as you say, rife with people being bullied for Not Being The Right Sort. Once you've been turned into a proper clone, you're fine! Until you get the therapy bills years later, of course. Boarding school isn't inherently bad, necessarily, though for very tinies it is deeply creepy, but in literature, at least, it's only a good experience if you happen to fit into a very narrow mould.

[conuly]

Neville would disagree with whom, me or them?

[hilarita]

Oh, with them.

[silveradept]

It doesn't seem like they stopped to think about what they were saying before saying it, because Hogwarts is miserable if you're not Harry or Draco.

[conuly]

Yup.

[alasse_irena]

Hogwarts is miserable if you *are* Harry or Draco, honestly.

[conuly]

I noticed something in the comments to the article I snagged that from (about how boarding schools are problematic) and a related one: the comments seem to be evenly divided between "yes, I went to boarding school and it was so awful, not just innately but with bullying etc." and "I went to school and it was great!" but if you remove the comments that follow up "I loved it" with "because it wasn't my shitty homelife" then all of a sudden the no's are winning, big time.

Half the yes's are ultimately Harry Potter - they love Hogwarts because the alternative is living with the Dursleys.

[alasse_irena]

I knew a few kids who boarded in their last year it two of school because they came from rural areas and local schools were unable to offer the subjects they wanted to study because of student numbers. So those kids had largely a fine home life and a fine time at school, but I think given other circumstances they would have preferred to stay closer to home.

I confess to having loved the Malory Towers books when I was a kid. But a lot of what I enjoyed about them was almost...watching what happened when you put all these repressed, still emotionally immature kids essentially alone together, because the messy semiromantic codependent relationships that Enid Blyton wrote were Very Interesting to tiny queer me.

But I definitely wouldn't use those books as a good model for childhood! God, that would be appalling...

[conuly]

Comments typically agree that more modern style boarding schools, and boarding starting in adolescence rather than childhood makes a huge difference.

As for the rest, there's also a lot of... rationalization of How Boarding Schools Work. (Not necessarily how they work today, but the image we have of boarding schools, which is not wholly invented.) All those things that kids were told were character-building? Having students supervise other students and sometimes enforce discipline, large common dormitories, plain food, all that other stuff? Yeah, that was a big old lie from the start. Schools were trying to keep costs down. And other things, many of which are epidemic in all forms of schooling - encouraging children not to tattle, group punishments, regimentation? The teachers didn't want to have to work any harder than strictly necessary. And we all know this, really.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, girlfriend, you MUST read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.hpmor.com/)!!!!

And when you get done with that, check out Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach (https://archiveofourown.org/works/20177950?view_full_work=true).

I'll wait...........

EDIT: I went to boarding school, and to the school's summer camp in Maine. If you want, I can tell you of the tragic and traumatic death of my pet mouse, Comrade Mickey, on the bus-ride to camp my Junior year, and of my barbaric but efficaceous self-treatment of a necrotic spider-bite, of which I still have a scar nearly half a century later. "Nothing fictional is alien to me."

I'd been bullied since kindergarten. At Devereux I joined the karate class, and was the only girl ever to stick with it long enough to earn rank. Because of that, by my Senior year, I'd stomped enough would-be bullies that nobody cared to fight me any more - my slogan was "You fuck with me, you fuck with death", which sounds metal AF at 17; bitches stopped stealing my stuff and tormenting my shy geeky friends. Therefore I have a lot of simpatico with the students of Hogwarts, who must have hated the place at least as much as they loved it.

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[conuly]

I have read both of them, in fact :)

And yes, I especially feel sorry for the Hogwarts students in Slytherin, trapped in the dungeon. Say what?

Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[conuly]

Also, sort of blanking out on mouse death. So sorry that happened.