I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of 
August 01, 2005
Harry Potter's school life (safe to read - no spoilers!)
I just finished reading the latest episode of the Harry Potter saga. I cannot claim to be a rabid fan since I have read only book 2 (Chamber of Secrets) and book 6 (Half-Blood Prince), although I have seen all three film versions, but they have all been enjoyable.
Reading these books reminds me of my own school days and of much of the British schoolboy literature I read as a child, especially the Billy Bunter series and the Tom Merry series, both written by the same author Frank Richards. (These books were produced at such a prodigious rate that there were suspicions that 'Frank Richards' was the pseudonym of a whole stable of authors just churning out the stuff.)
There was a rigid formula to these books, the main features of which the Potter series largely adheres to. The schools were all boarding schools, and the stories started with students arriving at the beginning of the academic year and having various adventures that fortuitously ended just at the end of the school year. (There was a complementary series of children's books by Enid Blyton which took place during the summer, with a group of friends arriving at their home town from various boarding schools, and having an adventure that ended just in time for them to go their separate ways the next academic year.)
The big difference between Harry Potter and the earlier Billy Bunter and Tom Merry series is that although the context of a British boarding school is the same, the Potter books are far better written, with complex plots and characters developed realistically, dealing with important issues of good and evil, and real human emotions. The books I read as a child had stereotypical characters (the smart student, the bully, the figure of fun, the lisping aristocrat, the athlete, the sarcastic one, etc.) who all behaved in highly predictable ways. Those characters were two-dimensional and never changed, never grew or matured. This was reassuring in some ways because you knew exactly what you were getting with the books, but you cannot enjoy them as an adult the way you can with Potter.
The earlier books and schools were also single sex and we young boys only read the books about boys' schools, while girls only read equivalent books dealing with girls' boarding schools. The only members of the opposite sex that appeared in the books were siblings who made cameo appearances. For all we knew, the books written for the boys may have been identical to those written for the girls with just the genders (and sports) of the characters switched, such was the rigid separation between what boys and girls read when we were growing up. There was no romance whatsoever in any of the story lines. Hogwarts, on the other hand, is co-ed, a major difference.
Another similarity between Potter and the earlier books is that the educational practices in all the schools are pretty conventional. The classes are run in an authoritarian way. As someone pointed out, Hogwarts seems a lot like a trade school, with students learning very specific skills involving potions, hexes, and the like, mostly by rote memory and repetitive practice, similar to the way the earlier books had students learning Latin and Greek. There does not really seem to be a theory of magic or even any interest in developing one. Some magic works, others don't, with no serious attempts to discover why. There is little or no questioning of the teachers or class discussions, or inquiry-oriented teaching.
Rowling is mining a very rich vein of British school literature. As we will see in the next posting, the world she creates is probably very familiar to anyone (like me) who grew up in an English-language school anywhere in the British colonies. What she has done is added magic (and good writing) to a tried and true formula. But since that tradition of boarding school-based fiction is not present in the US, it is interesting that she has managed to strike such a chord in readers here as well.
POST SCRIPT
An anonymous commenter to an earlier post gave a very useful link to the various shades of meaning attached to atheism and definitions of atheism and agnosticism.
Comments
I think two factors that the Potter books share with the books I read growing up are that they give a sense of empowerment to children while also allowing them to exist in a world of mystery and enchantment.
While Harry's homelife with his Aunt and Uncle is precarious, he has the opportunity to escape into a magical world where he may not be guaranteed safety, but he is able to pursue freewill. Rowling acknowledges that children are more capable than many adults may remember.
When I was little I read things like The Boxed Car Children, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harriet the Spy, The Phantom Tollbooth, and of course A Wrinkle in Time, all of which exhibited some of these qualities.
Enid Blyton wrote several of these boarding-school series stories for girls ... I had no idea that there were comparable ones for boys! But regardless, one of the more interesting ones was the "Naughtiest Girl" series, where the school discipline was run entirely by the students. Older students were involved in hearing cases of discipline infractions and setting appropriate punishments. Unlike the stories you describe, the bully or snobbish girl or whoever that term's bad person was always came around and became a fun and friendly addition to the class in Enid Blyton's stories (any series, not just this one).
Shruti: that's highly amusing to me, and makes Mano's point perfectly. I remember Enid Blyton exclusively as a writer of rather boyish books in which a couple of gangs of children (the Famous Five and Secret Seven IIRC) solved mysteries, and I was completely unaware of the Naughtiest Girl books. I went to a fairly traditional boys' school, and now I'm wondering if the girls' school across the street read the other half of Blyton's work.