Earl C. Wallace
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Harry Potter’s Ministry of Magic & The US Department of Education

11/14/2011

7 Comments

 
There are parallels between the US Department of Education and the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter’s Order of the Phoenix. This centralized governing educational bureaucracy is run by corrupt high officials who appear to be disoriented and incompetent, but are conspiring with Lord Voldemort to weaken Hogwart’s School, so the students do not learn what is necessary to defend themselves against his quest for power and dominance.  The Ministry heads are disdainful and patronizing towards teachers, students and muggle’s.  The result is a faltering educational system that compromises the vulnerable and captive students and places them in jeopardy.     

Hogwarts’ educational program is undermined by Senior Undersecretary to the Minister, Dolores Umbridge, whose personage, brightly colored clothing and upbeat tone of voice makes one mistake her as a well-meaning delightful person.  She first is assigned as a teacher to provide instruction on “Defence Against the Dark Arts,” while she proceeds to actually make the children defenseless against them. The Ministry promotes her as Hogwarts' "High Inquisitor" with power to inspect and remove teachers. She ultimately succeeds as Headmaster to control curriculum and the administration of Hogwarts.  The shrewd students, who are determined to learn, go underground and begin teaching themselves what they must know to survive.  

Mirroring this is the US Department of Education whose numerous costly mandates and initiatives also impede children’s ability to learn.  Taking phonics out of reading programs, for example, in favor of “whole word recognition” is like expecting Hogwarts’ students to cast spells before they know how to pronounce them syllabically.  Get a syllable wrong, and you have the wrong spell.  You aim for one outcome but arrive at another. 

While the outcomes are fictitious for Harry Potter and his friends, the sad realities our children struggle through in their classrooms are not.  

7 Comments
Jackie
11/29/2011 06:36:07 am

So we have two solutions. Raise kids who are shrewd, determined to learn and capable of going underground and learning on their own or keep them out of public school so they don't have to unlearn bad lessons being taught in public school. For many home schooling seems too large a sacrifice in this material world. How did our values get so out of whack.

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Lentenlands link
11/29/2011 07:35:50 am

Is there a marxist fascist socialist plot afoot to hijack all education? Let us consider:

"Public schools are helpless people yielding themselves to our molding hands." - David Rockefeller at a 1976 TriLateral Commission Meeting

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” and “Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever” - Vladimir Lenin

“During the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live.” -Walter Lippmann, at the Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29th, 1940

"He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” - Adolph Hitler

"Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?" - C.F. Potter: American educator

"In the New Order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society" - Antonio Gramsci

"In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation. At the very heart of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession.” - Joy Elmer Morgan, former editor of the National Education Association Journal

“Until man is convinced that the world has been abandoned by God, there will be no revolution.” - György Lukács, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Hungary's Minister of Culture.

"Fundamental Bible-believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the State, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in.” - Liberal Democrat and environmentalist Nebraska State Senator Peter Hoagland

"... the Communist Party whenever possible wanted to use the teachers' union for political purposes but the party had a definite interest in education also. The Communists in the Teachers' Union were for progressive education. We were its most vocal and enthusiastic supporters. I wondered at the time why the people at Columbia were interested in a small union like ours. Then I learned that the function of the Communist Party was to be the lead donkey pulling the drift of American life to the left … Most of the programs we advocated, the National Education Association followed the next year or so. They were following the Columbia group, too ... I remember the banning of report cards, the abolishment of fixed standards of achievement and the abolishing of a set curriculum. All Progressive Education principles." - Dr. Bella Dodd former teacher, ex-Communist, organiser of the New York Teachers' Union

"A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools."
William Z Foster, Chairman of the Communist Party USA, Towards a Soviet America (1932)

“In 1940, teachers were asked what they regarded as the three major problems in American schools. They identified the three major problems as: Littering, noise, and chewing gum. Teachers last year were asked what the three major problems in American schools were, and they defined them as: Rape, assault, and suicide.” William Bennett

"The change-agent teacher... is part of an association of colleagues in his local schools system, in his state and across the country that makes up an interlocking system of change-agent organizations. This kind of system is necessary because changing our society through the evolutionary educational process requires simultaneous action on three power levels." - editorial in NEA's Today's Education 1970

I think it's obvious what's being done to education in America and throughout the world today, and it's all based upon marxist fascist and socialist found

Reply
Spyder link
11/29/2011 11:44:33 am

Earl,

I understand your comparison between the Harry Potter people and the real people, but, the thing I don't see is the underground teachers in OUR world, unless those are the home schoolers, in which case, forget I ever said anything

Spyder

Reply
EarlW link
11/29/2011 01:26:31 pm

Jackie, you are right. Things are very screwed up. you are right about the solutions involving home schooling and private schooling too. Parents can find educational solutions that meet their philosophy, moral standards and objectives, but its a challenge for many to pay for public education, while they also try to afford alternatives.

Reply
EarlW
11/29/2011 01:31:37 pm

Lentenlands, I see the points of the overwhelming evidence you provide. It makes one wonder, can so many Ph.d.’s who are working within schools be so wrong by accident?

Reply
EarlW link
11/29/2011 01:35:37 pm

Spyder: You are correct. They indeed are the home schoolers and private schoolers too! 

Reply
Mark D
7/11/2020 04:30:43 pm

You folks thought it was bad in 2011, how about now? Rowling thinks tRump is worse than Lord Voltemort. And Betsy Devos plays the roke of Minister of Education to a T. Rowling's protagonist was fighting against evil and authoratarianism. That is what we in the US face now, fascist authoratarianism!

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