[HPforGrownups] Wizarding education matters

[Iris FT]

No: HPFGUIDX 46491


 
 
Education at Hogwarts, that’s an interesting topic. I’d like to share here some thinking about what kids are taught or not, and about what it could imply.

Learning and understanding

 

“Mathematics is probably not regarded as a separate subject in the WW–
much of muggle maths is quite closely related to muggle physics, 
and Wizards don't seem to use statistics much. Weights, measurements 
and timings would be covered in Potions. Calculation of angles, 
orbits, observation measurements, calendars, would be part of 
Astronomy. Generally, maths needed for a subject is almost certainly 
covered in that subject, *not* in separate, unmentioned classes.”

 

Isabelle Smadja, who wrote an essay about the Potter series, pointed out that the education young wizards receive at Hogwarts is close to humanist culture. Therefore, it’s quite normal if mathematics are involved in other subjects, because humanist culture didn’t consider them as something else than an implement for music, painting, architecture, etc.; just the way wizarding teaching seems to use them .Harry and Co don’t know how lucky they are, they don’t have to calculate only in order to calculate.

The matter is that there is one subject they don’t pay attention to enough, because of the way it is taught to them. 

Big part of Hogwarts pedagogy and teaching are based upon experimentation. JKR seems to consider that learning comes out of necessity, that’s why most of Hogwarts subjects deal with direct practice (Transfiguration, Potions, DADA whith Lupin or Moody/Crouch JR, for ex). Students have to practice, so they can understand how a spell or a potion works, what it is really. That how they build their own knowledge, and we see Harry and Co using what they learnt in those subjects to solve plots or to save the day (Wingardium Leviosa, Polyjuice,the Ridikkulus Spell, etc
). They use it because they understand why it is useful, just the way  they understand that mathematics are useful for Potions, Arithmancy, etc.

However, there’s a subject they don’t care much about and they don’t appeal to as much as they do with the others:  History of Magic.

 Professor Binns’s teaching is deadly boring, because his students only have to write and write, then learn what they wrote. This subject isn’t useless, but it seems to be, because of the way Binns teaches it. He looks like a scholastic teacher; his conception of knowledge seems to lean on compilation and repetition, and he doesn’t try to link with experience. As an example, we can consider that in CoS he doesn’t even think in telling his class the story of the Chamber of Secrets, while all the school is struck by Slytherin monster. Hermione has to ask him, and first he doesn’t know what to do, because he doesn’t see himself the relation between the subject he teaches and what is happening now.

Let’s add the homework he has given to Harry at the beginning of PoA: all the kid has to do, to write his essay, is to copy a paragraph out, probably because there is no other way of doing homework according to Binns’s pedagogy. Compilation, repetition. The result is that when he has to pass his exam, Harry prefers to write on his parchment what Florian “Wassisname” told him during the holidays. He doesn’t see the interest of discussing about witchcraft trials, because Binns didn’t show the class how important they were.

How could Harry think such a boring and sterile subject would help him?                                        However it’s obvious in Book 3 that there’s a close relation between what Harry is taught in History of Magic (witchcraft trials) and what he lives (Buckbeak’s trial and the iniquitous sentence that sent Sirius Black to Azkaban). Nevertheless, the boy just doesn’t see it because Binns didn’t teach him what History of Magic was for. And when one considers how important the question of trials and sentences seems to be in the series (see: the Pensieve chapter in Book 4, the Dementors), it’s obvious that History of Magic will come out as a major subject in Harry’s education. Simply because the Boy Who Lived and his doom are part of it.

History of  Magic could help Harry to understand better what is happening to him, to see that the wizarding time is cyclic, that some facts come back periodically. But there’s no help in the way Binns teaches History of Magic: he recites facts, he doesn’t analyse them, so he doesn’t make them understandable. It’s a true disaster, and nobody reacts.

Even worse: Binns , as a ghost, won’t go into retirement, and if some teachers are criticized (Hagrid, Lupin, even Dumbledore), he is not, so there’s no possibility he would be sacked. 

Is History of Magic a minor subject in the WW?  Probably.

Conclusion: the Dark Side can go on gaining power quietly; the WW doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the past. That’s the strongest Memory Charm you can find and that kind of amnesy is the fastest way for Voldemort to come back easily. 

Unless they are all partisans of the Dark Lord and have some interest in keeping History of Magic in its scholastic dead end, those who rule Hogwarts (and Dumbledore?) should think in what this subject is actually for. Taught as just a mere chronology, it’s practically useless.

Some will object that students can make the analyse by themselves. Okay, maybe someone like Hermione. But the average student will go on learning dates and facts, reciting them the day of the exam without understanding how they make sense. Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme(ask Fleur for a translation) could be one of the messages of the HP books.

 
Education and citizenship
 


”They obviously don't learn languages, as there are several jokes in 
GoF about the British Wizards general inability to speak any other 
language than their own (except for Crouch Sr. and Dumbledore).”

 

That’s right, and that’s  worrying from a social  point of view. Wizards forget what happened in the past, and they are rather careless about what could help their children to survive, like cooperating and opening up to the others. That’s probably why Hogwarts’students don’t learn languages (Hermione studies ancient runes, but are they a language or a code?). When you learn a foreign language, you also learn about a foreign society, a foreign culture, and IMHO, it can help people on the way of tolerance and cooperation, two bases of citizenship. Therefore, those two concepts don’t seem to have many importance in the WW education, though some try to develop them, for example, trying to restore the Triwizards Tournament. That’s a generous reaction, but the way it goes all along GoF shows it’s rather a fiasco.

Instead of developing cooperation, the Tournament exacerbates rivalries, between the three schools and between Hogwarts’students. What the kids are taught by this tournament is not cooperation, but division. That’s quite logical if we consider the three tasks: they are based upon competition and individualisation. Each champion must surpass the others and find solutions on his/her own. Their teachers (Karkaroff, Madame Maxime and even dear Hagrid) are ready to cheat to win (cf the dragons task). Each college wants to show the two others its superiority.  

However, there’s no need of a Tournament to point out divisions and competition in Hogwarts itself. All the Hogwarts educative system deals with competition. There’s a Four Houses Cup, there are four Quidditch teams, there are four Common Rooms with secret passwords.

Though JKR mentions in CoS “evening activities” cancelled because of the danger, we don’t know if there’s a room where the students can meet besides their respective Houses. There’s the Great Hall, but it’s not the same thing as a foyer, or a cafeteria, as there are in muggle schools. As for the clubs, the only one the kids attend is a duelling club, another fiasco.

If we consider Hogwarts as a micro-society, we can say that it doen’t know how to federate its students, or doesn’t want, maybe because of traditions. How in that case could this school educate citizens? That’s not the case.

It seems that the problems the WW has to face when Harry’s story at Hogwarts begins are

generated yet by the school itself. As a base of wizards’ education (the other one is family), Hogwarts’ traditional system maintain divisions instead of trying to borrow them.

That’s another major weakness for the WW, especially face to the Dark Side. The Dark Lord, as a dictator, knows how to federate his partisans, even if his methods are terror and menace.

The Dark Side has a forced unity, but it’s a strength. On the contrary, at the end of GoF, the “normal” wizards seem divided, so weak. Of course, we can expect a reaction and a great unity movement in the forthcoming books.                                                                    Nevertheless, that’s how the things are after four novels; the WW according to JKR is a society in danger because of its short memory and lack of evolution. Doomed, they are doomed; many listies debated this topic about the characters. Shouldn’t we debate it about the whole wizarding society?

The Dark Side understood yet how much those two weaknesses could be useful. Think in what Crouch Jr tells Harry in Moody’s office at the end of GoF, when he reveals the mechanisms of the plot. He points out the fact Harry doesn’t always understand that all he’s got to learn is important, and that he does need the others if he wants to go on. That’s IMHO how his criticising Harry’s behaviour with Neville, in which book was the solution to the second task, has to be understood. In one sense, this is the best lesson Harry ever received in Hogwarts.

 

But I’m maybe wrong, so wrong
.

 

 

Education at Hogwarts, that’s an interesting topic. I’d like to share here some thinking about what kids are taught or not, and about what it could imply.

Learning and understanding

 

Bluesqueak wrote:

“Mathematics is probably not regarded as a separate subject in the WW–
much of muggle maths is quite closely related to muggle physics, 
and Wizards don't seem to use statistics much. Weights, measurements 
and timings would be covered in Potions. Calculation of angles, 
orbits, observation measurements, calendars, would be part of 
Astronomy. Generally, maths needed for a subject is almost certainly 
covered in that subject, *not* in separate, unmentioned classes.”

 

Isabelle Smadja, who wrote an essay about the Potter series, pointed out that the education young wizards receive at Hogwarts is close to humanist culture. Therefore, it’s quite normal if mathematics are involved in other subjects, because humanist culture didn’t consider them as something else than an implement for music, painting, architecture, etc.; just the way wizarding teaching seems to use them .Harry and Co don’t know how lucky they are, they don’t have to calculate only in order to calculate.

The matter is that there is one subject they don’t pay attention to enough, because of the way it is taught to them. 

Big part of Hogwarts pedagogy and teaching are based upon experimentation. JKR seems to consider that learning comes out of necessity, that’s why most of Hogwarts subjects deal with direct practice (Transfiguration, Potions, DADA whith Lupin or Moody/Crouch JR, for ex). Students have to practice, so they can understand how a spell or a potion works, what it is really. That how they build their own knowledge, and we see Harry and Co using what they learnt in those subjects to solve plots or to save the day (Wingardium Leviosa, Polyjuice,the Ridikkulus Spell, etc
). They use it because they understand why it is useful, just the way  they understand that mathematics are useful for Potions, Arithmancy, etc.

However, there’s a subject they don’t care much about and they don’t appeal to as much as they do with the others:  History of Magic.

 Professor Binns’s teaching is deadly boring, because his students only have to write and write, then learn what they wrote. This subject isn’t useless, but it seems to be, because of the way Binns teaches it. He looks like a scholastic teacher; his conception of knowledge seems to lean on compilation and repetition, and he doesn’t try to link with experience. As an example, we can consider that in CoS he doesn’t even think in telling his class the story of the Chamber of Secrets, while all the school is struck by Slytherin monster. Hermione has to ask him, and first he doesn’t know what to do, because he doesn’t see himself the relation between the subject he teaches and what is happening now.

Let’s add the homework he has given to Harry at the beginning of PoA: all the kid has to do, to write his essay, is to copy a paragraph out, probably because there is no other way of doing homework according to Binns’s pedagogy. Compilation, repetition. The result is that when he has to pass his exam, Harry prefers to write on his parchment what Florian “Wassisname” told him during the holidays. He doesn’t see the interest of discussing about witchcraft trials, because Binns didn’t show the class how important they were.

How could Harry think such a boring and sterile subject would help him?                                                                                                        However it’s obvious in Book 3 that there’s a close relation between what Harry is taught in History of Magic (witchcraft trials) and what he lives (Buckbeak’s trial and the iniquitous sentence that sent Sirius Black to Azkaban). Nevertheless, the boy just doesn’t see it because Binns didn’t teach him what History of Magic was for. And when one considers how important the question of trials and sentences seems to be in the series (see: the Pensieve chapter in Book 4, the Dementors), it’s obvious that History of Magic will come out as a major subject in Harry’s education. Simply because the Boy Who Lived and his doom are part of it.

History of  Magic could help Harry to understand better what is happening to him, to see that the wizarding time is cyclic, that some facts come back periodically. But there’s no help in the way Binns teaches History of Magic: he recites facts, he doesn’t analyse them, so he doesn’t make them understandable. It’s a true disaster, and nobody reacts.

Even worse: Binns , as a ghost, won’t go into retirement, and if some teachers are criticized (Hagrid, Lupin, even Dumbledore), he is not, so there’s no possibility he would be sacked. 

Is History of Magic a minor subject in the WW?  Probably.

Conclusion: the Dark Side can go on gaining power quietly; the WW doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the past. That’s the strongest Memory Charm you can find and that kind of amnesy is the fastest way for Voldemort to come back easily. 

Unless they are all partisans of the Dark Lord and have some interest in keeping History of Magic in its scholastic dead end, those who rule Hogwarts (and Dumbledore?) should think in what this subject is actually for. Taught as just a mere chronology, it’s practically useless.

Some will object that students can make the analyse by themselves. Okay, maybe someone like Hermione. But the average student will go on learning dates and facts, reciting them the day of the exam without understanding how they make sense. Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme(ask Fleur for a translation) could be one of the messages of the HP books.

 

Education and citizenship 

Bluesqueak wrote:


”They obviously don't learn languages, as there are several jokes in 
GoF about the British Wizards general inability to speak any other 
language than their own (except for Crouch Sr. and Dumbledore).”

 

That’s right, and that’s  worrying from a social  point of view. Wizards forget what happened in the past, and they are rather careless about what could help their children to survive, like cooperating and opening up to the others. That’s probably why Hogwarts’students don’t learn languages (Hermione studies ancient runes, but are they a language or a code?). When you learn a foreign language, you also learn about a foreign society, a foreign culture, and IMHO, it can help people on the way of tolerance and cooperation, two bases of citizenship. Therefore, those two concepts don’t seem to have many importance in the WW education, though some try to develop them, for example, trying to restore the Triwizards Tournament. That’s a generous reaction, but the way it goes all along GoF shows it’s rather a fiasco.

Instead of developing cooperation, the Tournament exacerbates rivalries, between the three schools and between Hogwarts’students. What the kids are taught by this tournament is not cooperation, but division. That’s quite logical if we consider the three tasks: they are based upon competition and individualisation. Each champion must surpass the others and find solutions on his/her own. Their teachers (Karkaroff, Madame Maxime and even dear Hagrid) are ready to cheat to win (cf the dragons task). Each college wants to show the two others its superiority.  

However, there’s no need of a Tournament to point out divisions and competition in Hogwarts itself. All the Hogwarts educative system deals with competition. There’s a Four Houses Cup, there are four Quidditch teams, there are four Common Rooms with secret passwords.

Though JKR mentions in CoS “evening activities” cancelled because of the danger, we don’t know if there’s a room where the students can meet besides their respective Houses. There’s the Great Hall, but it’s not the same thing as a foyer, or a cafeteria, as there are in muggle schools. As for the clubs, the only one the kids attend is a duelling club, another fiasco.

If we consider Hogwarts as a micro-society, we can say that it doen’t know how to federate its students, or doesn’t want, maybe because of traditions. How in that case could this school educate citizens? That’s not the case.

It seems that the problems the WW has to face when Harry’s story at Hogwarts begins are

generated yet by the school itself. As a base of wizards’ education (the other one is family), Hogwarts’ traditional system maintain divisions instead of trying to borrow them.

That’s another major weakness for the WW, especially face to the Dark Side. The Dark Lord, as a dictator, knows how to federate his partisans, even if his methods are terror and menace.

The Dark Side has a forced unity, but it’s a strength. On the contrary, at the end of GoF, the “normal” wizards seem divided, so weak. Of course, we can expect a reaction and a great unity movement in the forthcoming books.                                                                                              Nevertheless, that’s how the things are after four novels; the WW according to JKR is a society in danger because of its short memory and lack of evolution. Doomed, they are doomed; many listies debated this topic about the characters. Shouldn’t we debate it about the whole wizarding society?

The Dark Side understood yet how much those two weaknesses could be useful. Think in what Crouch Jr tells Harry in Moody’s office at the end of GoF, when he reveals the mechanisms of the plot. He points out the fact Harry doesn’t always understand that all he’s got to learn is important, and that he does need the others if he wants to go on. That’s IMHO how his criticising Harry’s behaviour with Neville, in which book was the solution to the second task, has to be understood. In one sense, this is the best lesson Harry ever received in Hogwarts.

 

But I’m maybe wrong, so wrong
.

 

Iris

 

 

 

 

 

          

 

 

 

 

          

 



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