Lauren Edelson worried last week about how college tour guides deliver condescending pitches about how their schools resemble Hogwarts. Not a bad thing in my book, especially when you have seen schools that bear no resemblance at all to Hogwarts. Still, she makes a good point about how high school students are longing to grow up and out of Hogwarts: Leaving home and beginning life in a new place is a nerve-racking experience, and nothing seems more reassuring than imagining that college will be the realization of a fantasy world I’ve been imagining since childhood. Obviously colleges have picked up on this. But they’re trying too hard. They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled. After all, Harry Potter is frozen in high school, and we’re growing up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06edelson.html
I was sold on her argument until Dani Duggan (Weston High School) weighed in: What I still don’t understand is why Ms. Edelson thinks “selling” Harry Potter is a problem. As my dad says, you’re old for a very long time. So what’s the harm in a little magic?
And apropos Harry Potter in College, CNN.com has an interesting piece on Pottermania in the college classroom and interviews students who are taking a range of courses in which J.K. Rowling’s series is read.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/03/25/cnnu.potter/index.html
Usually I’m all for a little magic…but using Harry Potter in college tours gives me pause. This probably has something to do with the fact that I used to do it myself; one summer I worked as a tour guide for my college (Williams College), and yes, we did have the “Harry Potter” schtick in our spiel. And I said it every time. Yet here’s what gets me: we talked about how our residential system functions like the Harry Potter houses, since we are divided into four neighborhoods, which – so we tell our tour groups – function like Hogwarts Houses because everyone in them has such a sense of hanging-together-ness.
But really, the neighborhood system is wildly unpopular; 70% of the campus is *strongly dissatisfied* with the system, and there is a student movement underway to get it repealed. So I felt bad about saying that our neighborhood system was like Hogwarts, since really all we were doing was putting a deceptively positive spin on a broken system.