Am I a geek or what
Great Harry Potter article and how it relates to politics and taxes... god this article was made for me. -Drools- so I noticed a slight problem in it though... The columnist Fergus Cullen (My new hero) had stated that tuition was free at Hogwarts... (Again read the article please...) so I wrote this e-mail to him:
Harry Potter and the realm of big government had only one slight error in the piece...
"Government run schools: Children are taken away from their natural parents at age 11 and remanded to a government-run school, where they are required to wear uniforms and tuition is free."
Tuition isn’t free and this is noticed several times throughout the books.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K Rowling
1. "I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!" yelled Uncle Vernon. - pg. 59, Chapter 4: Keeper of the Key's
2. "Um - Hagrid?"
"Mm?" said Hagrid, who was pulling on his huge boots.
" I haven't god any money - and you heard Uncle Vernon last night... he won't pay for me to go and learn magic."
"Don't worry about that," said Hagrid, standing up and scratching his head. "D'yeh think yer parents didn't leave yeh anything?" - pg. 63, Chapter 5: Diagon Alley
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Not to mention in book 6, which I don’t care too look up, where Dumbledore was talking to young Tom Riddle and he said they have a fund to pay for students who were orphaned.
- Jason M. Frick
God my life is now officially meaningless.
Well to my amazement the columnist of the New Hampshire Union Leader (Which if you know your politics/journalism is a largely circulated newspaper) WROTE BACK. Here it is:
Hmmm. Well, you raise a good point, and I may be wrong about tuition - but I'm not totalty convinced. None of the Hogwarts students seem to fret about, say, Bursar Bills or tuition payments. No one is on work study. No one gets a summer job to "earn money for school." Not even the poor Weasleys worry about making the bill, not even when they had 4-5 children enrolled at the same time. (In contrast, in the real world, one often hears parents note the impact of having "2 college tuitions to pay" when two siblings are going to school at the same time.) My sense is that the subject doesn't come up because...no one has to pay. Vernon wouldn't know, or would just state categorically that he wouldn't pay, without knowing if there was tuition or not. Hagrid's comment also skirts the subject of tuition. When Dumbledore is recruiting Riddle, he could be be making Hogwarts sound more appealing and exclusive and elite while not revealing that, for instance, the same "fund" in fact pays for everyone, not just orphans (and if so, wouldn't Harry qualify for the same fund, negating Hagrid's comment?)
Nonetheless, I may have been out-geeked on this point, which is hard thing to do.
Thanks for reading, and for writing.
Fergus Cullen
3 Juniper Green
Wolfeboro, NH 03894
603-520-5450 c
603-569-9084 h
ferguscullen@aol.com
So being me I couldn’t loose an argument so I replied:
It's England its most likely subsidized.