Harry's assumption VS Everyone's assumption

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 151714

> Tonks:
> > Children are told what they need to know for their stage of 
life. 
> Beyond that it is the adult's responsibility to protect and guide 
> the child. When he was younger Harry had no right to know anything 
> that the adults were doing. The adults WILL take care of it.  That 
> is why children have parents and are not just hatched under a rock 
> and on their own from day one.
> 
> Ceridwen:
> Since the quoted post was a response to me, it's obvious that I 
> believe this.  Harry, or any child in this position, already had 
> enough to do with learning his lessons, which will be important to 
> his task, without worrying about what the adults are up to.  
> Dumbledore had some reason that he thought was good enough, so he 
> trusted Snape.  Harry starts the series at eleven, and very 
> importantly, as a baby in the WW.  He needs to be protected from 
> having to worry about every little thing as he learns his way 
around 
> what is, to him, an alien society.  He has little experience with 
> adults, or with life in general.  And the experience he has is 
very 
> negative - the Dursleys, and the teachers at his primary school 
who 
> didn't notice that something fishy was going on in his life.  And, 
> children are very black-and-white about the rules.  A bad guy is 
> always bad, a good guy is always good.  That's why Sirius told him 
> that people weren't divided neatly into two camps.

Magpie:
But I would say that the fifth book is where this truly breaks down, 
as part of the text.  Dumbledore's "protection" of Harry in OotP is 
a problem, and in the end I think it's even revealed that he's 
crossed the line from responsible parenting to coddling for his own 
reasons.  He didn't have to tell Harry about the prophecy to make 
things better.  He could have just made sure that someone sat him 
down and explained what Voldemort was doing.  Granted it should have 
been obvious even to Harry, but it wasn't, and since he doesn't 
trust Snape he was pre-disposed to wonder whether Occlumency was in 
his best interest.  Harry's own poor thinking in this case was 
reason to explain more to him, not less, because the older he gets 
the harder he is to control.  He's begun to expect to be treated 
more like an adult so DD can't just withdraw from him.

In general I see no reason in the fifth book why Harry couldn't have 
been told about the Prophecy earlier.  Since the books are about 
growing up the moment was always going to come where Harry *was* 
told what he needed to know.  About half of OotP was Harry demanding 
to be treated as an adult without really understanding what that 
meant and so seeming childish, which is probably why a lot of people 
saw Harry as taking a step back in OotP, becoming immature where he 
had once been so mature for his age.  Really I think he was going 
through that necessary adolescent phase that just always sounds like 
that--much as Draco does with Snape in HBP (both boys looked at from 
another angle also seem older.)

But along with Harry's adolescent demands I think we also very much 
saw the adults making bad descisions about not telling him things 
because they wanted to protect him in ways for which he was too 
old.  He'd gotten to where he had to share in the responsibility and 
the people who are the most protective of him are doing so for their 
own reasons--Molly mothers, Dumbledore sentimentally wants to make 
him "happy."  Sirius sometimes went too far in the other direction 
(wanting him to be more like James and so take unnecessary risks) 
but I think he's still correct about his instincts to tell Harry the 
truth.  Maybe it's because Sirius sometimes seems stuck in 
adolescence, maybe not, but I think his instincts there were right.

Then there's also the fact that Dumbledore doesn't just keep 
children out of the loop, he keeps adults out too.  Not that he 
should tell them everything--I agree with the post saying that in a 
military operation it's good not to let people know more than they 
need to know.  But Dumbledore goes beyond that in the tradition of 
the Wise Old Man in fantasy.  People are expected to trust his whims 
and gut feelings without explanation.  No one in the Order has a 
good idea why they're trusting ex-Death Eater Snape so they can't 
judge him themselves, which puts them in the same childish position 
as Harry at times.  I've started re-reading HBP and in their first 
trip to Diagon Alley we hear the Ministry wanted to give Harry a 
normal security force but "Dumbledore thought" Hagrid would do fine--
and Hagrid then goes on to prove completely inadequate.  Nothing 
terribly bad happens, but it's still kind of an interesting incident.

-m