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

[Joywitch]

No: HPFGUIDX 5310

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Catlady <catlady at w...> wrote:
about four topics numbered below.

>>>1. Happy Birthday 

I always seem to be offline for a few days when there is a birthday 
but I do want to say Have a Happy to Catlady and belatedly to our 
Fearless Leader Penny.  (I sent my owl, Drowsy, to Sirius Black to 
ask him if he could drop by each of your houses for a little *visit*, 
just for a little birthday gift, but Drowsy owl claimed she couldnt 
find him.  She spent a long time looking, though, and I could not 
help noticing that she now has a suntan. hmmmm.)

>>>2. 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.

This is the part of the overall HP plot that I am the most confused 
about -- what DOES JKR intend, damnit? -- but it is hard to believe 
that Snapes liking for Draco is anything other than authentic 
favortism for a friends kid.
 
>>>3. Snape liking Lucius ties into the topic of social class. The 
wizarding folk seem to have an intense social class system. [snip] 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

Good point.  It is important, IMHO, to remember that the whole HP 
series is a thinly-veiled metaphor about bigotry, consistent with 
JKRs political convictions. 

>>>4. 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. [a whole lot of snipping]

While I dont disagree at all with Catladys analysis, I think there is 
another reason while distributional requirements exist:  While in 
general, colleges and universities in the US are pretty good, our 
public school system is not too good.  It is pretty easy to graduate 
from high school in the US without even learning to read very well, 
as a result, studies have shown that somewhere around 20% (I cant 
remember the actual number) of U.S. adults are functionally 
illiterate even though something like 90% graduate from high school.  
Therefore many colleges are forced to deal with students who are 
simply unprepared for college work.  IMHO, that is why so many 
colleges have such broad and deep distributional requirements.  In 
the 1960s and 70s, many colleges did not have those requirements, but 
they seemed to have all re-appeared in force during the 1980s.

-- Joywitch