[HPforGrownups] British schools

[Amanda Lewanski]

No: HPFGUIDX 1703

Peg Kerr wrote:

> This message has run on pretty long, and the only thing I'll add is a
> question to our UK members.  Is the picture of Hogwarts being set up to
> run on interhouse rivalry an accurate picture of British schools?  Upon
> thinking about it, I wonder at Dumbledore a little for running a school
> structure that seems so fraught with the potential for causing
> envy/competitiveness/competition to ferment into bad feeling.

Okay. I will preface this with I Am Not British. I've never lived there. But
I've always gotten the feeling that the British are much less hung up than
Americans on the belief that life's gonna (gotta) be fair. And they allow
their children to experience this truth, that life happens and it sometimes
sucks, a little earlier than Americans do (if Americans ever get around to
telling their children this at all). The "hands off" approach to operating
Hogwarts is one way of giving its students a measure of Life Studies, as it
were, with the teachers there as moderators rather than enforcers.

This agrees with the European attitudes toward children and alcohol, too.
Kids who have never been allowed near alcohol often find it alluring and are
bowled over by their first experiences with it. And kids who have never been
allowed to understand that sometimes you get stood on and that's just the
way it is, are often bowled over by their first experience of the real
world.

This, from an overprotective mom. Sigh. Knowing what's intelligent and doing
it are so very different sometimes.

Anyway, that's my thought.

--Amanda