>>6135013>>6135336>>6135344>Harry Potter school houses>OH MY GOD THE HOUSE RIVALRY SLYTHERIN GRYFFINDOR !!I remember from my school days nobody cared about houses it was sort of embarrassing, teachers tried to award these colour merit stickers gold stars etc to create house rivalry by linking the merit awards to academic achievements nobody cared. The houses were named after some saints like Alban, Bede, Cuthbert or historical figures like Cowper, Drake etc (usually followed some ABCD scheme). All you got if your house "won" was some mention in assembly or a lame award, no-one actually wanted this, it was extremely shameful. I got an English-French dictionary which I never used and £20 book vouchers for WHSmiths. I mentioned in a past qtg a more accurate depiction of British education is provided by the film The Hole (2001)
https://archived.moe/qst/thread/5861271/#5888933https://archived.moe/qst/thread/5861271/#5888929it has Keira Knightley in it lol, this film is more authentic in depicting British education in a contemporaneous era to Harry Potter
As a cultural export or as some evergreen revenue generating IP franchise for WBD lol I suppose Harry Potter stands as a testament to the inadequacy insularity and increasing irrelevancy of the British education system as it disengages from the modern world, retreating into nostalgic vestiges of societal archaisms distorted by the fondness yet haplessness of memory for empire. Essentially Gormenghast for children, British education can no longer produce neither intellect nor talent - indeed perhaps it never did, for in the propulsive invigorated age of the Industrial Revolution many of the engineers, gentleman natural philsophers and hobbyist industrialists were self-taught and self-made (eg Stephenson). The Dickensian world depicted by Harry Potter is astonishingly antiquated and insular and essentially predicts nothing which is surprising because even Star Wars can prophesy a trade war. I think Harry Potter was the product of a comfortable Blairite era dissociated from consequences, Blair in his "education education education" mode, when the worst threats JK Rowling could imagine to Britain were fictional journalists like Rita Skeeter (lol before the Iraq War aftermath resulted in legal emasculation of the British press) existing in the multicultural melange of Parvatis Cho Changs and Igor Karkaroff Sturmdrangs, this is what Britain under Blair imagined foreign countries to resemble. Harry Potter itself essentially reduces down to What Matters In Life Is Who Your Parents Are. Which is probably true for Britain. It would have been better for the world if Voldemort had just killed him
