Harry's bias again, answering several posts

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 141053

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67"
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:

> Carol responds:
> I'm not sure that we can judge the extent of Harry's ignorance based
> on Ron's response, considering that Ron never cracks a book unless
he has to.

Pippin:
That's exactly my point. Ron is our index of what's common knowledge,
as opposed to booklearning. Harry could have learned all those things
from books just as Hermione did, (she's probably the sort who reads
dictionaries and encyclopedias just for fun)  but they evidently
aren't the kind of things any young wizard  would know but no Muggle 
would, like how many players are on a Quidditch team or who are the 
Weird Sisters. So Snape is picking on Harry but not for being
ignorant of common wizarding knowledge. 

Snape is pointing out that Harry is nothing special, which wouldn't 
bother Harry (he didn't *want* to be special, right?) except that
it made him look bad in front of the Slytherins. He does think he
should be better than them.

 While Harry may not have had an initial bias against
Snape as a person, he had definitely already developed a bias
against Slytherin House. He'd been given misinformation (there 
never was a wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin) and 
had already decided that they looked like a hard lot.

What changes between this scene and the one in HBP is not Snape's 
behavior or Harry's tendency to mouth off without thinking but
Harry's reaction to being punished.  In SS/PS, Harry is mortified
that he has lost a point for Gryffindor. In HBP, getting a detention
is no big deal and House points are scarely worth thinking about, 
though Harry is annoyed when Hermione doesn't get any for 
answering a question correctly. But (correct me if I'm wrong) we've 
never seen Snape give points for answering a question correctly. 

Pippin