Boarding school (WAS: Re: No Sex, Please, We're British (was ethics in the WW )

[Shaun Hately]

No: HPFGUIDX 83296

I didn't go to a school in Britain, but I did attend one of a number
of Australian schools that were set up in the 19th century as copies
of the 'best' British schools, and still maintain many of their
practices and traditions (and have evolved parallel to their British
counterparts, so are still fairly similar today). So I'll have a go at
this.

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "adsong16" <gorda_ad at h...> wrote:

> I think we may be having a cultural difference here, either between
Britain and 
> the US, or between those of us who have been to high school recently
and 
> those who, er, have not. 

I think the cultural difference may go further than that - Hogwarts is
a very particular *type* of school (well, it's a pretty unique school
- but it also shows a heavy type influence in many ways of the
traditional 'British Public School') - these are very particular
environments and while all are different and any generalisations will
be precisely that, these schools can be radically different from other
schools, and the mores of the school can sometimes be quite different
from what would normally be expected.
 
> Personally, I went to high school in the early 90s in Mexico and 
> although some people were having sex, it was quite rare. Most of us 
> just talked and thought about it non-stop... 

That matches my experiences as well - at my school, talking about sex
wasn't uncommon - actually doing it with someone else involved was
uncommon.
 
> Now, more recently I taught at a boarding school and also at a 
> sleepaway camp over the summer, and I can tell you that in fact the 
> staff did have to basically keep the kids away from each other with 
> cattle prods. 

That will very much depend on the school. At my school, no cattle
prods were needed - but that was partly because we knew they'd come
out if they ever were needed (-8

What I mean by that is that there was very little need to teachers to
actively attempt to prevent students being sexually active, because
everybody knew that if it started to happen too often, the teachers
were capable of taking action. Provided we kept things fairly low key,
we knew there wouldn't be too much interference - and so people did
keep things low key to avoid pushing the teachers too far.

What this meant was that we had a situation where if particular
individuals wanted to do something, they probably could - but most
people rarely tried.

And because this was the common attitude, there was very little
pressure to be sexually active - if somebody was, OK - we weren't
particularly judgemental (and we might even be a little jealous) - but
we also didn't feel under any institutionalised pressure to compete.

> Understandably there are many reasons why Rowling is keeping away 
> from this issue for now and possibly for the rest of the series, as 
> you all have already pointed out. But this is only one of the things 
> I wanted to draw attention to.
> 
> JKR has said that she never went to boarding school, and I must say 
> it shows. I particularly note the long stretches of unsupervised time 
> that kids have (evenings after dinner, say 6 pm or so, and all of 
> Saturday and Sunday, not to mention holidays). In American boarding 
> schools there is rarely unsupervised time for the kids, with the 
> thought that "idle hands are the devil's playground." Usually after 
> dinner there is a study hall, during which the staff makes sure the 
> kids are doing their homework, and no more than an hour or so until 
> lights-out (kids must be in bed and quiet). During weekends and 
> holidays there are supervised "fun" activities: going to the movies, 
> bowling, games, etc. At some schools there are Saturday morning 
> classes, and/or at least one evening a week devoted to community 
> service. 

Well, my experiences were at a school that did give us a fair amount
of unsupervised free time - but under the clear understanding that if
you ever proved you couldn't be responsible with that level of
personal autonomy, you could find yourself with a *very* structured
environment (and even worse so might all your classmates).

It wasn't *quite* as unstructured as Hogwarts seems to be - but it was
close enough that when reading the Harry Potter books, I don't feel
any massive disconnect with my own experiences. We had compulsory
sports training two nights a week, and compulsory Saturday morning
sport (and this was for day students as well as boarders), and until
you reached the senior school, study was supervised at night as well -
but even with all that, you probably had... at least two hours, often
as many as four of pretty much free time of an evening, and at least
six to eight on a Saturday or a Sunday. They didn't try to fill up
every minute of our lives, partly because we were expected to learn
how to fill that time ourselves as early as possible - part of making
us self sufficient withing a safe environment.
 
> The same tight schedule applies to sleepaway camps, again with only an 
> hour at most at a time to spend unsupervised. Of course this being a
litigious 
> society, schools don't want to be open to law suits in case the
little darlings 
> get into trouble when there's no adult around...
> 
> To bring this back to canon, I notice that staff at Hogwarts are 
> considerable more empowered to hand out punishments than in my 
> experience, Mr. Filch's frustrations notwithstanding. Not only is 
> there the point system, which adds peer pressure to the mix, but
also > the fact that they can hand out detentions and can determine
when and > how such a detention will be served. In my experience a
student would 
> need to accumulate a certain number of demerits ("bad" points) before 
> they were assigned detention, which would always be at 
> the same time, same activity, and would not normally be supervised by 
> the teacher who handed out the detention.

Well, at my school, teachers could most certainly hand out summary
punishments and did so quite regularly. Step out of line and you were
quite possibly going to be handed an instant detention. We had formal
detentions which were at a set time and a set activity (generally
copying out the school rules, or an incredibly boring mathematics text
published in 1878) - but provided they were reasonable, teachers could
certainly assign another form of detention and often did. I cleaned a
bus once, dug weeds out of a garden - one of my friends served a
detention playing soccer on one occasion!

And there were worse punishments than mere detentions.

Briefly - I went to a school that drew on many of the same traditions,
Hogwarts seems to. And Hogwarts seems internally consistent to me
based on those experiences. That doesn't mean it *has* to be that way
- JKR could have made different choices on many issues and still wound
up with a school that 'felt right' - but nonetheless, I think the
choices she has made are close enough to enough people's experiences
that there's nothing jarring.

Examples:

Change that wouldn't set off my personal alarms: Having a structured
study session every evening

Change that would have seemed really odd: Hogwarts having a squad of
cheerleaders wearing tight skirts and poms poms.

Authors need to make their environments feel right to people -
Hogwarts *feels right* to me, based on my experiences. Indeed the
similarities to the schooling I experienced are on reason the books
first grabbed me.

The revelation that there is sexual activity going on at Hogwarts
wouldn't, by itself, wreck the feel for me - because the idea of it
happening wouldn't be absurd.

But the fact that what is going on, only seems to be at a low level -
likewise, that doesn't seem problematic to me. It seems perfectly
plausible.

I'd certainly be very interested to hear from anyone whose experiences
were at schools even closer to the Hogwarts model - but I'd say mine
are closer than most of the people on the list, even though they were
in a different country.

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia