Harry Potter and the Perpetuation of the Myth.
We're reading them in our house. In fact they're being read in thousands of houses round the country. They're exciting adventure stories full of mystery and magic, and kids are loving them. But they're also school books, books that pass on the message that whatever you want to do in life, even if it's being a wizard, the only place you can learn how to do it is school.
Harry Potter lives a horrendous life, shut in the cupboard under the stairs by night, and shut in a muggle school by day, and then a glimpse of light is given to him when he learns that he is actually from a wizard family. He's not normal, he's extraordinary, and a completely different life is opened up to him, the reader starts to imagine all the possibilities... but what do we get... a school. Well, you hope, it can't be like a normal school, it'll be different, wizards are magical and their way of doing things will be so unusual that it will not seem like a school at all. But it's not a nice, free, child-friendly, democratic school. Imagine a Hogwarts run like Summerhill, now that might be a school worth going to. But no, it's a backwards-looking, authoritarian school, with petty rules and adults whose words are law, no argument, no discussion, no excuses, and take your punishment silently. It's a school full of tedious teachers, incompetent teachers, intimidating teachers and teachers who enjoy humiliating you, boring lessons, rote learning and stressful exams. And then there's those manipulative and conformity-enforcing 'house points', given for good behaviour and teacher-pleasing answers and removed for disobedience of the rules. It's a school where you are fed information as the teachers judge fit, in the order they see fit, where an area of the library is restricted because it contains inappropriate material, where first years are not allowed to own broomsticks, where expelled pupils will never really make anything of themselves and where Harry suffers from that most mysterious of conditions, 'summer learning loss'. Harry and his friends have their best adventures outside of lessons of course, but they are never allowed to forget that the adults know better than them, know what is good for them and hold all the power, in both senses of the word!
Children are fed with school ideas of learning right from the earliest age but I am coming to the conclusion that reinforcement of the school-equals-learning equation is one that takes place to an equal extent through the stories that they read and are read to them. Harry Potter is only one book, but one of many, too numerous to list, where the assumptions about children, learning, growing up, education and schooling are the ones that our society is so fond of perpetuating. The myth is that you go to school to do your learning, and it's the only place it can happen; that it's hard to learn things, complicated, too difficult a process for children to grasp alone. If you perpetuate this myth effectively enough soon even the children whose lives are being stolen by the system come to believe it is the only way. To quote John Taylor Gatto, "It is the triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things."
Published in the December '99 issue of Choice in Education
newsletter.