Harry Potter’s world (part 1)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

6.  Harry Potter’s World (part 1)

The second to the last Harry Potter movie came out about a month ago.  This series is still so popular that the final book had to be split into two movie parts.  Of course, this is probably simply a way to make more money from Harry Potter fans, but having re-read the final volume while viewing the new trailer repeatedly, ending this story is complicated; perhaps worthy of two movies!  The characters are almost “grown” now, and Voldemort has gathered his minions again.  The Ministry of Magic has fallen.  Darkness reigns.

In some ways a return to darkness describes 2010, the year of the dead queer (Lugg, 2010), the year of the tea party (Rayfield, 2010)—back to the 1950’s (or the 1700’s depending on your interpretation; Bell, 1989).  I situate myself as a radical social reconstructionist (Stone, 2003, p. 108), and all I see around me are essentialist ideas being promoted in education.  Where could Harry Potter possibly fit into this essentialist school culture?  “What is it about our culture that embraces the Harry Potter books and has turned Harry Potter into such a phenomenon?” (Appelbaum, 2008, p. 95).  Appelbaum debunks three “presumptions”:

Can we say that consumer culture has trumped all other possible manifestations of liberal democracy? … Do we want to say that children are passive, naive recipients of greedy corporate cultural products? … Can we understand the cultural meanings of Harry Potter stories (or any other popular cultural artifact) as a distance observer?  (p. 95-96)

How do readers utilize these stories to make sense of their lives?  Where does school fit into this process?

In both the Harry Potter books and in children’s lives, school functions to accentuate what constitutes technologies, what constitutes magic and wonder, and, finally, through consumer culture, what it means to become a human being.  In this way, I find the books and the culture that embraces them buttress each others’ postmodern efforts to fulfill an outdated enlightenment fantasy of utopia through technology.

The technoculture of consumer culture in and out of school

For children growing up in and with technoculture, concepts of cyborg imagery, biological monsters, fantasy characters, power, knowledge, magic, and prosthetic extensions of self are not categorical. (p. 97)

Children accept new ideas as part of their world more readily than adults.  Magic may be conceived as science, and vice versa.  Science may be perceived as technological, and vice versa.  Technology may be considered magic, and vice versa.  Knowledge and power are bestowed by each but with fewer boundaries or conflicts in the child’s world.

Technocentric utopianism for many children is really more aptly described as melancholic acceptance of responsibility.  (p. 97)

For Harry magic becomes a technology in the war between good and evil, amplifying human powers as a kind of cultural capital.  Similarly, science and technology function in the school curriculum as “techniques of progress” seldom questioned or interrogated (p. 99).

Educator’s responses

Teachers tend to feign disinterest in childhood experiences of cyberculture.  (p. 99)

School knowledge is assumed to be part of “high-status culture” while popular culture and mass media are considered “low-status,” which teachers want to keep out of school.  “When teachers preserve the in-school versus outside-of-school boundaries, they cut themselves off from relationships with children directly connected with the most pressing issues of self, identity, morality, power, and knowledge” (p. 99).

I suggest that our new technoculture requires teaching practices that facilitate an interrogation of this culture, and the facilitation of self-understanding necessary to unravel the intricacies of self-identity in a post-modern world.  The “new curriculum” should consider alternative visions of technology that move it away from the metaphor of prosthesis. … Curriculum, then, must speak fully to issues of identity and questions of what it means to be human in the face of re-engineering and cultural change.  (p. 100)

In the Harry Potter stories the challenges that matter occur outside the classroom.  Everything Harry and his friends learn help them survive greater and greater difficulties in the outside world.  What if this idea were practiced in school buildings today?  What kinds of paradigm shifts would have to happen for that to be the case?  Would schooling continue to be merely a reproduction of the dominant ideology?  Or could schooling take upon itself an innovative role?  How would that innovation affect the curriculum decisions made inside the classroom?

Bell, D.  (1989).  And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice.  Cambridge, MA:  Basic Books.

Lugg, C.  (2010, September 30).  Bullying, harrassing, and beating queers in hope of self-extermination.  Thinking queerly (blog).  Retrieved from http://cath47.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/bullying-harassing-and-beating-queers-in-hopes-of-self-extermination/

Rayfield, J.  (2010, December 20).  Tea Party founder:  Let’s get rid of the ‘socialist’ Methodist church.  TPMMuckraker (online).  Retrieved from http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/tea_party_nation_founder_lets_get_rid_of_the_socia.php

Stone, F. A.  (2003).  Theodore Brameld’s educational reconstruction:  An intellectual biography.  San Francisco, CA:  Caddo Gap Press.