Up to No Good
The Dreadful Pedagogy of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry
In the early 2000s, I was one of the millions of American children who lined up outside bookstores at midnight dressed as British prep school students — or, as we called them, wizards. Growing up with Harry, Ron, and Hermione defined my generation’s orientation towards, among other things, academic tradition. We first encountered academic regalia, vaulted dining halls, and the ritualistic recitation of Latin not as antiquated trappings of an exclusionary education system, but, rather, as the fantastical oddities of a fictional world that we longed to escape to.
We spent years waiting for Hogwarts letters that never came. Some of us found creative ways to make do in Muggle-school. I, for instance, once wore a Quidditch costume to a pep rally when we were supposed to dress up like athletes. As we weathered the angst of adolescence, we longed for friendships like those made in the Gryffindor Common Room. (Pro tip, kids: if you want make friends with real-life Gryffindors, don’t be the kid who wears a Quidditch costume to the pep rally.)
The impulse to ascribe pedagogical virtue to books that have had such a profound cultural impact, and particularly to ones that romanticize school as a place of magic, is understandable. Reputable sources tell me that Harry Potter taught my generation how to read, how to empathize, and, alarmingly, how to respond to geopolitical crisis. Meanwhile, in my corner of the world, Latin teachers celebrate Harry Potter as a gateway to classics because the stories are a patchwork of classical allusion and Latin (or something like it) is the language of wizardry.
Yet for all the talk about the pedagogical value of the books, we say little about the pedagogy in the books. Harry discovers the wizarding world, and his place in it, through a series of pedagogical encounters, and Hogwarts School of Witchraft and Wizardry is almost a character in its own right. With its shifting staircases, Room of Requirement, and animate suits of armor, the school becomes both the site of and an active participant in the ultimate showdown between good and evil.
Schools are powerful institutions, both in the sense that education can have a powerful impact on a child, and in the more pernicious sense that schools reflect and maintain the workings of power in society. We often tell a hopeful narrative about education as a social equalizer. In 1993 Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld actually described a good public school system as “the magic wand that brings opportunity.”
But Bordieu suggests that formal education is more often than not a mechanism by which the state reproduces class distinctions. Academic content is only a part of what we learn in school; we also learn a way of being, of embodying an assigned role. Within an anthropological framework, whether a student graduates as a “success” or “failure” (an Auror or a Death Eater), the student has learned an identity through school.
The challenge of the progressive educator is to guide students to identify and dismantle violent and oppressive structures — a process that Friere calls conscientization — while working within the confines of an education system that is far better suited to reinscribing them. We tread a fine line between disruption and reproduction. But when we succeed, we can create in our classroom what bell hooks describes as “a radical space of possibility.”
What kind of educational space is Hogwarts? Like many elite institutions, the wizard school has a Latin motto: draco dormiens numquam titillandus (never tickle a sleeping dragon). Since Harry never takes a Latin class, I can only assume that the motto’s communicative power lies more in Latin as a status symbol than in the grammatical sense of the phrase. Nevertheless, the phrase captures the conservative impulse at the core of Hogwarts’ pedagogical mission. It might be read as the wizarding equivalent of “don’t rock the boat.”
But it seems, after twenty years of Pottermania, high time that we tickle the sleeping dragon, interrogate our celebration of how Harry Potter shaped a generation’s collective imagination, and face the fact that the magic of Harry Potter bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the processes by which academic institutions discriminate and exclude.
Imagine the year is 1991 and you are ten years old. The Sorting Hat tells you that you belong with the “cunning folks [who] use any means to achieve their ends.” You normally wouldn’t put much store in the opinion of a sentient piece of felt, but your parents, teachers, and peers all take the ritual very seriously.
In your first year at Hogwarts, you spend your free time with fellow Slytherins because the other kids distrust you on sight; they whisper rumors about how You Know Who and his Death Eaters were Slytherins. Most of the teachers, who police student behavior through awarding House points and demerits at their whim, seem to share in the other students’ distrust. Nevertheless, you and your friends trudge through. You ace tests, win sporting matches, follow the rules, and Slytherin wins the House Cup.
But in your moment of victory, the headmaster arbitrarily awards just enough last-minute points to four rule-breaking Gryffindors to knock you from first place.
“Which means,” Dumbledore called out over the storm of applause, for even Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were celebrating the downfall of Slytherin, “we need a change of decoration.”
He clapped his hands. In an instant, the green hangings became scarlet and the silver became gold; the huge Slytherin serpent vanished and a towering Gryffindor lion took its place.
It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated theory of learning to understand why so many Slytherins become Death Eaters.
In Harry’s day the culture of Hogwarts, arising from the accumulated tradition of 1,000 years of pedagogical practice, is embodied in the figure of Albus Dumbledore, “the greatest wizard of modern times.” He is the only wizard whom Voldemort fears. He also happens to be complicit in the rise Voldemort’s regime.
One might expect our favorite twinkly-eyed headmaster to take responsibility for the development of all his students and seize any opportunity to praise Slytherins for a job well done. If human sympathy doesn’t move him to consider the feelings of the most troubled children in his charge, then at the very least a pragmatic desire to disrupt the cycle by which Slytherins become killers should.
Instead he publicly assigns Slytherins the role of the bad guys and models a practice of ostracizing them. Of course, he wouldn’t see it this way. He subscribes to the theory of child development espoused by Hogwarts’ 10th-century founders and annually reinscribed in school culture through the ritual of sorting: a child’s character is innate, fixed, and, given the tendency of house assignments to run in families, probably inherited.
Progressive education is absent from Hogwarts because, if children don’t change, then learning as transformation — indeed learning as anything other than the memorization of facts — is impossible. The role of the educator in such a world is rather bleak and hopeless. All Dumbledore can do, it seems, is preside over the inevitable process by which children are socialized into a competitive system and one generation replaces the next, with all the same inequalities and flaws.
Hogwarts ensures the reproduction of a society that is consciously, even proudly, regressive. The closest thing to social justice advocacy is S.P.E.W., a student group founded on the radical proposition that slavery is probably wrong. Social deviants are imprisoned in a hellscape where ghouls suck all the joy from their souls. Restorative justice, of course, would make little sense in a society that takes the immutability of character as its organizing principle.
And at the heart of this society is the devastating inequality between magical and non-magical humans. Access to Hogwarts, though open to individuals of all class and creed, is policed on the basis of the distinction that constitutes the boundaries wizarding world — “you are either magical or you are not.” Education cannot make a child magical; it can only socialize and advance children who were already magical to begin with. The most successful students either become Hogwarts professors or join a bureaucracy whose explicit mandate is to obfuscate the existence of magic. Substitute the word “power” for “magic” and one wonders whether Rowling meant to write a dystopian allegory about the neoliberal state and we’ve been misreading the tone this whole time.
The fact that none of the heroic and rebellious witches and wizards that populate Hogwarts expresses outrage at this inequality is evidence that Hogwarts is doing its job. We get a glimpse of the way that discriminatory culture is normalized through education in the heartbreaking story of Lily and Petunia Evans that exists on the periphery of the narrative:
“… I’m sorry, Tuney, I’m sorry! Listen — ”She caught her sister’s hand and held tight to it, even thought Petunia tried to pull away. “Maybe once I’m there — no, listen, Tuney! Maybe once I’m there, I’ll be able to go to Professor Dumbledore and persuade him to change his mind!”
Lily is a girl of integrity who questions the justice of the Hogwarts admissions policy. Yet the impulse to challenge Dumbledore is eroded as she is sorted into Gryffindor, becomes Head Girl, and marries the school bully. I suppose there’s still something admirable about Lily Potter fighting to overthrow Voldemort, but I personally would rather read a book about Lily Evans standing in solidarity with the likes of Petunia Dursley, Argus Filch, and Arabella Figg to overthrow the entire system.
All children’s literature need not take up political resistance as its central theme. But the insidiousness of Harry Potter is that the books masquerade as morality tales about love, tolerance, and diversity even as their appeal derives from still-relevant and contested images of elitism and exclusion neutralized and re-coded as symbols of magic.
A few years ago, the Oxford University Student Union held a referendum on whether to discontinue the practice of mandatory academic dress for exams (because at Oxford you’re still not allowed to sit an exam unless you’re dressed like wizard). The student body voted in favor of the status quo and academic dress remains. Amidst the debate, a column in the Oxford Student noted that the issue at stake wasn’t just a harmless tradition, but, rather, a tradition that “contributes to perceptions of Oxford as structurally elitist and unwelcoming.” In other words, academic dress is not merely a neutral quirk of an academic system that is in other ways exclusive but, rather, is one of the means by which the exclusion works. Not so in Harry Potter, where the burden of discrimination is removed from school policy and placed on the pure chance by which some people are born magical and others are not.
Latin, of course, has historically been part of this constellation of practices through which academic institutions exclude. Harry Potter may popularize Latin, but it does not popularize Latin as a language with a contested history or as a language that anyone can learn. Instead, the Latin flavor of magical spells plays on and perpetuates the sense that Latin is enticing precisely because it is exceptional and inaccessible to all but a special few.
When we escape to Hogwarts with Harry, we imagine that we have joined the most enchanting and elite of groups without suffering anxiety that we might have gained access at another’s expense. If magic is truly a trait that can’t be learned, then those of us who luck out needn’t feel badly about inequality or take responsibility for the fate of Muggles and Squibs. We can fight uncritically in Dumbledore’s Army without the troublesome worry that, no matter how well-meaning we are, we might sometimes be part of the problem. In other words, Harry Potter is a fantasy of guilt-free privilege. The extent to which we continue to collectively indulge in this fantasy should make us all a bit uncomfortable.
So what now? Should we stop children enjoying Harry Potter? Probably not. I don’t even intend to stop myself enjoying the occasional escape to the wizarding world. But I am glad that I never received my Hogwarts letter. Dumbledore is the figure of the educator I hope never to become, and Hogwarts is the educational space I hope never to create.
In the end, critiquing the teaching in Harry Potter opens up new possibilities for teaching with Harry Potter. When the opportunity arises, we can nudge our students to ask whether what happens at Hogwarts seems fair. We can encourage them to imagine a world more radically different, more radically just, than the options available in either reality or fantasy. Harry Potter could offer a relatively low-stakes ground on which to teach children the important lesson that we must question and critique, even and especially the things that we love, and that we can often enjoy the process. In other words, we can bring Harry Potter into the classroom to get children in the habit of always tickling the sleeping dragon.
Elizabeth Butterworth is the Director of Development at the Paideia Institute and a proud Hufflepuff. Though the high point of her academic career was placing in the Amazon.com “Harry Potter Magical Candy” contest in 1999, she did continue her studies thereafter and eventually earned degrees in classics and education. Most of her friends are also Hufflepuffs.