[HPforGrownups] British schools

[Warmsley]

No: HPFGUIDX 1731

>> 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.
>

I know that at my british public (a quick explanation: public =
private, state = public. brits, eh?)
school, no-one gives a damn about house stuff. Maybe fifty years
ago...
Amusingly, my house, Kingsley, is named after Charles Kingsley,
an Old Boy of the school that wrote "Onwards Christian Soldiers"
(the hymn) and is quoted in my RS book as an example of how
racism was considered perfectly normal by most people a century
or two ago (something along the lines of brains being smaller,
or some similar tosh).


>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.
>

That's very true. But it's more of a continental attitude. Here,
most (young) people drink to get drunk. And it's spreading to
Europe too.

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

Damned if you do and damned if you don't...

Jeremy