Elizabeth Minkel takes issue with Maria Bustillos’s take on class in the Harry Potter series, and this sentence in particular:
It is a horrible thing to be teaching children, that you have to be chosen’; that the highest places in this world are gained by celestial fiat, rather than by working out how to get there yourself and then busting tail until you succeed.
Minkel rebuts:
My only serious qualm with the article is its conclusion, because for all of the moralizing, the only prescription seems to be, Yank that Potter book out of your child’s hands and give them something by Philip Pullman.’ It feels tacked onPullman is championed without enough explanationand it left me wondering how Bustillo feels about just about every other work of British children’s literature, fantasy or otherwise, reflections of a society in which class is an entrenched construction.