Oh my goodness, what book are THEY reading?

[saraquel_omphale]

No: HPFGUIDX 106859

OK, having read all the posts so far, I'm not going to directly quote 
everyone, but I do find the whole thing quite interesting.  I agree 
with Del, that this is a great French pastime - a good argument, and 
to some extent I agree with the author of the article, and I'm 
English.  My heart has sunk on quite a few occasions during the 
books, notably - the introduction of prefects: I hate the notion of 
children policing children, and the blatant conferring of favour and 
power for conforming to what the system wants you to be. Secondly, my 
heart hit rock bottom (and this one could be controversial to some of 
my British contributors, :-)) when I learned the title of the next 
HP - Oh JKR did you HAVE to bring royalty into it!!!

The books are very conformist in their stance, but this is a world 
that children have come to expect to find in literature.  This is a 
value system which goes way back into the last century. I love the HP 
books, not for their politics (which I find dubious at times) but for 
JKR's storytelling ability and the element of suspense and mystery.

For the non-conformist, there is always the balance of Philip 
Pulman's 'His Dark Materials', which are wonderfully subversive.

Lastly, a note about public/private/state schools.  Hogwarts must be 
a state school (funded and regulated by the government) as the 
Ministry is able to send in its representative (Umbridge) to control 
it.  Now unless the wizarding world is a dictatorship - which we know 
it isn't - that would not be possible.  There might be a confusion of 
terms here - in Britain, public schools (Eton, Harrow etc) are 
privately owned, and extremely expensive and elitist.  Who knows 
where the money comes to keep Hogwarts running - but I doubt the 
Weasley's could afford to keep four of their children at the school 
at the same time if they had to pay school fees.

Saraquel