HB / Snape-Draco / social class / (long) liberal arts

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 5184

Happy (belated) birthday, Penny. You deserve all the paeans Flying Ford
Anglia and everyone sent your way. November 4 is my brother's birthday
(I did e-mail him birthday greetings) , November 5 is Barry's birthday
(my friend's husband), and November 7 is my birthday. A nice little nest
of Scorpions.

Amanda did present a totally new (to me, anyway) theory of Snape: that
he dislikes Draco and is deliberately screwing him up by favoritism. It
makes a lot of sense and there is no evidence against it.

But in MY world, Snape likes Draco. In my world, Snape likes Lucius
(because Lucius takes the effort to be genial to Snape in a patronizing
way and hint at using his position on Board of Trustees to get Snape a
promotion). In my world, Lucius believes Snape is still a loyal Death
Eater who only pretended to spy for Dumbledore as a way of gaining his
own safety, and Snape believes Lucius's tale that he was only involved
with the Death Eaters because they put a spell on him.  When Harry tells
Dumbledore et alia whom he saw at the Death Eater circle, Snape flinches
when Lucius is mentioned. No one knows why he flinched, or even whether
it was really a flinch or some other reaction, but the only explanation
I've seen offered is that that was the first time that Snape learned
that Lucius is still a Death Eater. On another tentacle, how has Snape
missed hearing Draco boast of 'WHEN You Know Who returns'?

Snape liking Lucius ties into the topic of social class. The wizarding
folk seem to have an intense social class system. Presumably the Malfoys
aren't the ONLY rich, old, landed-gentry family, altho' making THE
villain the ONLY rich, old, landed-gentry family is a tidy piece of
'vulgar Marxism'. And other families range down the social ladder,
Fudges to Potters to Weasleys to Stan Shunpike, with class status a
matter of pedigree, accent, tastes in food, and a whole lot of things
besides how much money you have and how much education you have. But
they seem not to care AT ALL about the Muggle social class ladder: I
believe that Justin Finch-Fletchly's reason for existing is to show that
the wizarding folk don't perceive any different between him and Colin
Creevey the milkman's son. Another piece of 'diversity'.  Altho', in re
diversity, I could go off on a tangent about the lack of 'physically
challenged' students.

But my point (I did have one) is that Lucius's high social standing
causes Snape to feel complimented by Lucius saying things that he would
feel insulted by pretty much anyone else saying.

USAmerican colleges and universities always have distributional
requirements for bachelor's degrees (requirements to 'distribute' your
earned credits among multiple subjects). As has been said, this is
because their Ideal is the Well Rounded Education. An education which is
Not Intended to fit a person for a job. It's called Liberal Arts because
it is topics suitable for free men (and women, but no women were free
when the name was invented), which means not slaves, which means people
who don't have to work for a living. Liberal from the same root as
Liberty.

An education which is not intended to fit a person for a job:  the old
American idea was that business executives would start, not by going to
college, but by getting a job as messenger boy (suitable for people who
left school after 8th grade) or mail room clerk (suitable for people who
left school after 12th grade) and work their way up by learning on the
job. Almost an apprenticeship system. Which is almost what Percy is
doing at MoM: he isn't a mail room clerk, but he isn't an executive
either: he's an Admin Aide writing a report on Cauldron Thickness in
hope of being promoted to Admin Assistant, and maybe someday to Admin
Analyst!

An education which is not intended to fit a person for a job, but rather
to fit a person for citizenship and the examined life. Citizenship:
We're supposed to learn some History (US and our own state) because
'those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it' (the
Congress and Senate's debate on the vote to declare war on Iraq (ten
years ago) featured legislators supporting their position by citing the
Pelopenesian War, WWII Invasion of Poland, the Vietnam War). We're
supposed to learn some Science because we have to vote on initiatives
about nuclear waste disposal, the electricity grid, water pollution,
public health. We're supposed to learn to analyze Literature and other
arts because they think that the arts most starkly display the moral
questions that arise in human life, and that people will be more
prepared to act morally if they think about the matter before the
challenge actually arises. I absolutely agree with the belief that a
person who is going to make a decision would do well to know something
about the decision that he or she is making, but insist that there are
more ways to learn than just going to college, and suspect that nothing
whatsoever is learned from studying Literature the way it was forced
upon me.

(Speaking of Literature: I was much taken aback by the posts in which
people said that engineers (or any kind of professional) should take
English classes so they can learn to write because they WILL have to
write on the job (and also if they want to write a Letter to the Editor
of their newspaper). Because there was never any connection between the
English classes that I was forced to take and the ability to write since
I finished 7th grade (age 12). In the rest of middle school, the English
classes were about finding the 'theme' (actually, the moral) of stories
and after that, the English classes were about searching out Freudian
sexual symbolism in the stories. It was necessary to write essays
(usually 500 to 1000 words) about the theme or sexual symbolism that we
had discovered, but what the teachers demanded from us was the OPPOSITE
of good writing. "Don't ever use a small word when a big word will do.
Don't use the active voice when you could use the passive voice [when
the passive voice could be used]. Never use the first person." were
notes that my teachers wrote on my essays before returning them with low
grades.)

Last year there was this woman who told me that I'm an anti-intellectual
lover of ignorance because I said (and still believe) that employers
should hire people based on their ability, knowledge and skill to do the
job, not on whether they have a college degree. Cooler tempered debaters
suggested that 1) a person who has gotten a college degree has
demonstrated an ability to endure and obey a lot of useless bullshit, an
ability which many employers value higher than ability to do the job,
and 2) a person who has learned such different subjects as the history
of China, Plato's Socrates's philosophy, and astrophysics, has thereby
learned METHODS OF LEARNING that are applicable to MANY DIFFERENT FIELDS
of learning, such as when they have to crash-learn enough about
workman's comp or inventory management or income tax law to analyse the
user requirements for a computer system to help the people do that kind
of work. I had to admit the first point, but on the second, I continued
to insist that there are more ways to learn those subjects than going to
college.

Examined life: who said 'the unexamined life is not worth living"? We're
supposed to learn some History so we can look at our hometown with some
idea of how it used to be and how it turned from that to this. We're
supposed to learn some Science so we can look at the beautiful rainbow
and know that it wasn't applied with a paintbrush. We're supposed to
learn to analyze Literature and the other arts so we can see parallels
between the artwork and our own lives. There is room to debate whether
the Examined Life is worth living, but the people who invented Liberal
Arts didn't think so.

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