Dark Magic Doth Never Prosper, Part II
Part II contains:
Drawback to Not Teaching the Dark Arts
Harry: Seriously Evil Wizard Coming Through?
Blood/Death Magic, Lily’s Sacrifice, and Albus (The White One)
Why Teach that Dark = Evil?
Historical Considerations
( DRAWBACK TO NOT FORMALLY )
Drawback to Not Teaching the Dark Arts
Harry: Seriously Evil Wizard Coming Through?
Blood/Death Magic, Lily’s Sacrifice, and Albus (The White One)
Why Teach that Dark = Evil?
Historical Considerations
( DRAWBACK TO NOT FORMALLY )
Magical objects... I think in part we're running into Harry's incurious nature here. I wouldn't expect such a small community to support much by the way of arts and music--we know they have some, but Harry's only interested in the portraits as they communicate with him, and Harry doesn't usually have access to the Wizarding Wireless. And the only thing he reads for pleasure is Quidditch, so we wouldn't know about literature. (And the Hogwarts library sounds like my college library, which had no popular literature at all. I realized upon graduation that I'd missed four years of fiction. So we wouldn't find out Wizarding literature from Hermione--she'd never read Beedle, for Pete's sake. And Ron read comics and Quidditch.)
As far as the map goes... that's an interesting idea, that they might have invoked some of the castle's own magic. Hard to see how they could have, though.
Have fun!
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The college library where I work (cataloging) includes in its collection, besides various other current fiction, Harry Potter -- and Twilight. *wry grin*
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Actually, thinking through the ramifications of all this stuff makes me *crazy*. As I said, marauder's map. *Unless* it was a special case (invoking the castle's magic) it strikes me a multi-thousand galleon level of effort involved in its creation--it tracks *everybody*, makes custom insults that suggest a level of sophistication that boggles the mind. I mean, imagine writing a computer program back in the late 70s that would know to address a teenaged rival by a formal job title you'd have no reason to expect him to have? Fifteen years on in the future, no less? Not to mention giving advice on sneaking around? Granted, magic is more amenable to flexible thinking/successful turing machines, but still, that map was an amazing accomplishment. Without its being built on other stuff, e.g. castle's sentience.
And yes, Harry is incurious, but even so, the author's bias is plain. Granted he has no interest in culture, but even ignorant slobs in muggledom know that the Mona Lisa is considered a great painting, or that Beethovan was one of the great western art music composers. They may think that sort of thing is pansy-ass, but they acknowledge it *exists*. Not once in seven books (with the caveat that my memory is a sieve to make swiss cheese look solid) is *any* piece of art, music, dance, or drama cited as great. Funny, mediocre, positively bad, sure. Hogwarts is supposed to be `the greatest school of magic' in the world. I.e., a place of education. Thus, somewhere, somehow, we should be exposed to *something*. Oh wait, scholarship is held in equally high esteem.
Mind you, I think the sports-mad anti-bookish/arty/culture background is one of the reasons the books were so popular---sports and hating school (at least in th US, and, I'm guessing, the UK as well) evidently are a far more common attitude than the typical sf/f arc in which the misunderstood bookworm finds a world of *people just like him*---but I also feel there's no denying it.
One mightn't expect a college to have fiction. (Though I discovered EE "Doc" Smith, then out of print, at my college's library. Its rare book room, in fact.) And perhaps in the UK, HS libraries are similarly barren, though it seems foolish in the extreme, if they truly wish to inspire kids to read.
And even if Harry didn't read, it stretches the bounds of imagination to suggest that Hermione never once dipped a toe in fiction. If there was some that was considered part of a well-rounded witches' education. Ditto other aspects of culture. So far as we know, she doesn't.
Hence, my case.
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Or take the Asian model, in which warriors (samurai) were also expected to be equally competent calligraphers and poets---refined men of culture.
There isn't anything like that in the WW. I grant you Harry isn't interested, but a truly balanced liberal education would expose him, like it or not, to at the absolute minimum, some sort of ethics or philosophy of magic, and it ought to have some sort of art to balance the sciences (astronomy, arithmancy, potions). Even my high school required at least one arty type class.
It does not.
We know this because Hermione doesn't feel even what pitiful literature (Beedle) there exists is important to her academic career. Better yet, why hasn't Dumbles, who's supposed to be so bright, put any music or literature (seems like some cautionary tales might be useful) in the curriculum?
Cos it ain't important, that's why.
That is why I say there is authorial bias.
(Not to mention the fact that there are 12 professional quidditch teams for 3400 people;)
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Though 12 teams is still a bit...much, even then. I'm with you there. ;)
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Really, Hogwarts under Dumbles is the worst sort of Trade School.
And while we're on the subject of complaining about the school, do you notice that there have been inter-House clubs, but apparently Dumbles does nothing to keep them going? There was a Gobstones Club in Eileen's time (which is played one-on-one, like chess, not house-against-house like Quidditch), the Slug Club which left when he did, the one-meeting Dueling Club, the D.A....
Any of which Dumbles could have encouraged, or inter-house study groups, or....
One might almost infer that Dumbles disliked the idea of inter-house unity.
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But yes, I do wish we heard more of such activities. Even if Harry doesn't have time for them someone might mention going to them, coming back from them, meeting someone there etc. (OTOH we don't even know whom Hermione takes her extra classes with so why would we hear about activities that don't involve anyone of the trio?)
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It feels to me, sadly, of a piece with a general issue with the books: telling instead of showing, image/style over substance.
*tries to suppress snarky comment about Snape being all substance and not much style, and so getting a bum rap* - *apparently fails* ;)
Or it could be that Harry's just self-absorbed and unobservant, and therefore oblivious. Also possible.
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2. clubs
3. ww population #s
Actually, imo, Hogwarts fails as a trade school, pretty much, too: the only explicitly useful class--in the way home ec, woodshop or fixing cars are day-to-day useful--seems to be potions. Charms is another possibility, and more-knowledgeable readers can no doubt cite useful house-hold charms the students are taught. I don't recall any, tho! But how, ferex, the students apply arithmancy, runes, astronomy, let alone history! to their daily existence, escapes me. I don't ever regret being taught algebra or geometry, but only have ever used the former in my daily life, and the latter not at all.
Moreover, if the school is geared to helping students in their careers, and most ww jobs are with the ministry of magic...why aren't they being taught english composition and bureaucratese? (Not to mention handwriting/calligraphy, which was indeed considered important until typewriters became common.)
Personally I think Hogwarts is supposed to be of an academic bent; it just echoes many mainstream folks' opinion that the arts are just useless frills; as opposed to a powerful alternative way of thinking about the world.
2. Clubs. My spouse is of the same opinion as condwiramurs, that a lot of the stuff simply didn't make it in, because it wasn't germane to Harry's oblivious pov. (Something tells me JKR lived in her own little world during HS; well, I wouldn't know anything about that!) I could agree with Harry-didn't-notice, except that...if those clubs existed, they should've had some effect on house unity, Harry's efforts to recruit for DA, etc. This gets back to why I find world building so difficult: it takes a very analytical mind to consider all the consequences of a given situation. Terri notes that she runs HM Snape through Milesian thought-processes (i.e. decision trees) and I wish she'd write a post, step by step, on how she does this, since my approach is almost entirely intuitive. So, I miss a lot. I'd love to have a more structured way to think about these problems.
3. Which brings us to condwiramur's comment about ww population. I've gone thru this discussion once already with Claire/Whitehound, and while I agree she and redhen have made very cogent and well supported arguments from what I think of as first-order evidence, I still feel those numbers are unconvincingly small, for the level of sophistication their culture displays. That is, thinking about the ww community from a social stratification pov, (second order assumptions) even 14000 doesn't seem nearly enough. (I was horrified when I extrapolated those #s to US, and discovered there would only be 50k magicians; I wanted half a million, minimum.) That is, as a LC poster pointed out, there is way too much dissension of attitude for even 14k people--ze compared it to hir town, in which everyone had the same ideas, and from which ze couldn't wait to escape. But in the WW, we have snobby purebloods (malfoys), death eaters, renegade purebloods (weasleys), ordinary schmoes, DA-types, etc.
Now, obviously, there's all those inputs from the muggle pop, which I think was estimated at something like 5% of total students, not to mention the other races, which have quite different attitudes than ordinary Jane Witch, but there are other problems with using them, what I call the Arthur Weasley issue. Which I when I get time I'll try to write up, but right now I'm still thinking about that. There are times when I wish I were a real historian, and this is one of them...
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