Harry Potter and the Bones of Empire

Two days ago “Big names in AI and Silicon Valley tech announced yesterday that they’re launching a boarding academy for 16 to 22 year olds.” (Faine Greenwood) And I commented, “This is a kind of modernized version of the English boarding school and those were actually pretty horrible. I mean, it’s fun to read boarding schools stories but think about what it was like to live them out! […] My spouse has an absolutely scathing critique of [the Harry Potter] books. I think I’m going to ask them to tell me again and write it out as a blog post!”

And I did, I interviewed them, and here is the result.

R: You were saying you had problems with Harry Potter? What were the problems?

S: Well, growing up, I read a lot of English [boarding] school books because I did not have access to American fiction. So Harry Potter is in a format I understood: the English boarding school story. The books I read were written in the ‘40s, '50s, and '60s. So, to me, Harry Potter was right in line with them. But they weren’t in line with 2000. I didn’t notice that and it kind of slapped me in the face because it was all an English boarding school story, but the genre has moved on. Then I read the epilogue to the last book–number seven? And in that epilogue Harry Potter and his wife, Hermione and her husband are at the station, seeing their own kids off. It’s a replay of Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron’s going off to Hogwarts! To a situation where they are unprotected by any teachers, at the mercy of a number of very dangerous creatures, And they’re happily sending their kids off to school to suffer the same goddamn thing.

They went to war. They lost people. They won the war only to have nothing change. And that was the last time I read a Harry Potter book, because I remembered those books very, very well. And at that point, I thought back and said, “Whoa! What was Rowling on? Why did nothing change?” She was not capable of imagining a world with a different school system and of course, a school system is a basis of culture because we teach our kids and they grow up and they move and act in the way they were taught; they become the old system. You see it very clearly in Harry Potter when they infiltrate the Ministry of Magic and then they grow up and they’re part of the Ministry of Magic and nothing has changed. It’s still all completely vulnerable to a Voldemort taking control of it again. And that one thing, just kind of blew me away. But having made that particular leap, I sat back and looked at it. The houses, the conflict between the houses, the cheating of the teachers between the houses, the attempt to enforce regulations. The slavery. The slavery was right there.

R: you mean, Dobby, and so on?

S: The house elves, yeah, yeah, house elves. Deliberately putting children in danger as punishments for misbehaving in class. You’re going to have to go into the forest with Hagrid and find out what’s going on. And what’s going on? Voldemort sucking the blood out of the centaurs? Voldemort. An evil so dangerous, even Dumbledore doesn’t face him, and they send Hagrid and two boys off to deal with him?

It took that final scene in book seven for me to stop, step back, and go: “The bullying. The conflict between houses, the deliberate creation of animosities, and lack of team spirit in the school.” The creation of “It’s my department and nobody else can have as good a department as me, and I’m going to make sure that everybody else doesn’t get what privilege I get.” It’s all baked into that school system Rowling wrote.

But she wrote out of her knowledge of that whole system of schools and ideology which is in every single school story I ever read. They’re separated by houses. They have games, house against house. They’re supposed to be good sports about losing. Oh, but the way those games are written, it matters incredibly whether they win or lose, and whichever is the focus of the house.

There was a series called Mallory Towers, and there was North, South, East, and West houses and all the girl protagonist in the books were North Tower house. And they always ended up winning, and it was hard and it was tough and they had to really push it, and they had to win! That teaches people to compartmentalize. It also teaches people to participate in aristocracy, and that is shown by their system of prefects and house heads. (The movie Secret Places shows that.)

My house, not my school, not my county, not my nation, not my world. My house, we’re all going to be in my house, and nobody else gets anything that we get will be the winners forever. And to the winners go the spoils.

I can’t tell you how it affected me to hear Trump say that at the United Nations. I just sat there with my mouth agape and had to stop the recording and not listen to anything more. But that is what the English school system was designed to do. It was designed to teach the children to go out into society and to be hoarders, to be grifters, to cheat. To try and make their little piece of paradise the best and have the mostest. And basically, Rowling took it to its nth degree. And it was pretty shocking when I finally saw what I was looking at.

I don’t think I have the Harry Potter books or the movies anymore.

R: I was going to ask. Have you read the older [boarding school] books? Have you read Stalky? Have you read Tom Jones?

S: Yeah. I didn’t read them until I was an adult. As a kid I was reading Angela Brazil, and, uh, what was the other one called? There were two very famous authors, … Enid. Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil. Went over and over and over and this and there were a lot of other school storie I read that I can’t remember the authors of, and they were just pot boilers, but I didn’t have anything else to read, so I read them extensively. Even to a certain extent C.S Lewis fell into that trap with The Silver Chair. His expression of what the experimental school was pretty much followed what schools were like.

R: That was modeled on an actual school: Summerhill School.

S: But so were all the other books I read. You can see the surface of what is shown to the parents as the glories of the school and then in the books they show you the underneath part, which is nasty. So, yeah, I read Tom Jones. I read Flashman.

R: Oh God, you got through Flashman.

S: At least a couple of them. But the point is Flashman first occurs in Tom Jones. Yeah, I know who beats Tom Jones up. So, I, I don’t think I ever sat down and thought about the consequences of the school system. But then I was deeply marginalized until I went into the Mexican school system. So that was right through seventh grade and to me, they were a refuge, a place where people at least acted fair. It was only later that I found out that, oh hey there! And there’s a whole body of work that I never saw because they weren’t stocked in the bookstore I went to of the marginalized girl that never fit in and a couple of authors who specialized in that but I only found them as an adult. To me, those [Blyton and Brazil] were golden until I stopped and went. “Oh, their consequences.” You know, it was just days and days and days of remembering passages and scenes in the books I’d read and going. “Oh, damn! Looks different from this side, doesn’t it?”

R: Do you know anything about the literature in other countries? Because of course, this was part of the British colonial system. Colonialism was throughout Europe. And not only Europe. Do you know anything about the German or the French or Russian?

S: Oh, well, okay. And their school systems were different.

France with the revolution. destroyed the monasteries and nunneries. Convent training was important for girls, but not for boys. And the school system developed very, very differently in France. The school system in Germany by the 1800s for men education skewed towards being very militarized. And by the time of the Third Reich, the women’s education Institute heavily towards teaching Kinder, Küche, Kirche.

My grandmother was a very bright student and very popular. She was elected to be president of her class. One of the teachers came to her and said, “Are you sure you’re full-blooded Jew? Couldn’t you possibly be a mischling so we can keep you in the president position?” She said she was very angry and she just looked at the teacher and said. “Oh, no. Purebred Jew.” So the school systems in other countries develop developed very, very differently. England seems to have been an …

R: Outlier. I think that’s the word you’re looking for.

Yeah, a creature of its own. Sui generis. In France, the focus turned technical or arts very young basically French children chose by secondary school whether they were going to go into Sciences or Humanities and having made that decision went forward. In fact, that was how it was in Mexico. For certain university systems, you had to do their high school, and if you made the decision and went to the wrong high school, you had to repeat high school.

R: I believe that was also the case in Germany and maybe still is.

S: I think it’s still the case in France, so their schooling system is completely different, and it just doesn’t approach anywhere near what the English system does.

R: Thank you very much. It sounds like you had that ready to all that ready to go, because that was almost a prepared speech.

S: I’ve been thinking about it, for–has it been 15 or 20 years since the last of the Harry Potter books came out?–and I write books. So, when I run into references or online, there’s a huge discussion about whether or not we should let kids read Harry Potter, mostly because they feel that Rowling’s has tainted it, and they don’t see it as poisoned fruit from the beginning. And I don’t know how to talk about that. Once a young friend told me, “Oh, JK Rowling is a piece of s***, but she can’t have back Harry Potter. It’s ours now.” And a lot of people feel that way. The fantasy of a magical school where kids are mostly left to bring themselves up and pretty unsupervised and endangered makes kids feel powerful. They like to go into that fantasy.

David Gerrold, ran into a little wizard the other day at one of the cons. And she said something to him about being a wizard. And he said, “I didn’t tell her that Rowling was a piece of s***,” I said, “I hope you’re a good wizard when you grow up.” Meaning competent.

I don’t know how to talk about this to those people who internalized Harry Potter, because I don’t think they internalize those flaws. They’ve internalized the bravery of the main characters. They’ve internalized the fact that the world can be a dangerous place, they’ve internalized you have to fight for good. They internalize those things, and that’s good.

R: It’s like a war story, isn’t it? You know you, you talk about the camaraderie, and so on. But all those deaths kind of get left out.

S: Angela Brazil’s stories happened during World War II and a few during World War One. She was a long-lived writer. You know that poem about the little boats?

R: Probably not.

S: There’s a poem about the small ships that go to evacuate Dunkirk. [Robert Nathan’s Dunkirk]. Look it up and read it. It reduces me to tears every time. There’s a set of stories that I like, very much by Arthur Ransome. {Swallows and Amazons.] Curiously, the children who inspired those stories were Iranian. Neighbors of his, who came every summer to England and they inspired the stories, but the children in the books are English. And every so often, I read that book, and I think, “What happened to them in World War II? Where did they go?” These were the children that were brought up after World War I. Their parents were desperate to bring them up happy, free, competent, willing to go out and grasp life. And then they faced a war, and some did not come home. Mary Renault’s The Charioteer always seems to me to be the conclusion to Swallows and Amazons. So, yeah, I’ve been thinking about these things for quite a while.