Harry Potter and the flight from reality

Maybe it's all different these days. The Boarding Education Alliance talks of a new "culture of open communication and partnership." Its literature batters home the new marketing message: The British boarding school is no longer a rough forcing house designed to train a self-perpetuating elite. It's for enlightened parents (and the divorced) interested in imparting some early lessons in self-reliance and community living without the brutalizing effects of incarceration.

And only through boarding can these fortunate children derive the full benefits of swanky facilities that today's schools offer. What you're buying is an updated Hogwarts experience -- all those cozy values without the misery -- not a 19th century survival.

Read the BEA's dossier for proof of the new home-away-from-home style. According to its exhaustive survey, almost half of boarding pupils now live within 50 miles of the school, 80 percent sleep under their own duvets, 90 percent tack their own posters on their walls and, yes, most actually took part in the decision to board. One in three families is earning less than 50,000 pounds (almost $76,000) a year and many are scrimping hard to find the fees -- a measure of how highly they value the boarding school product.

The worst barbarisms are forgotten. Fewer and fewer kids are starting to board at 8 or younger. (My cousin began at 5, a near record even for the late '50s.) Children are even allowed to go home on weekends. For contact with home we depended on the mail and, until the mid-'60s, a single half-term visit. The law now obliges boarding schools to install telephones where children can call home without being overheard.

Certainly the curriculum has developed. How about those 18th-birthday pictures this month of an aproned Prince William learning to cook? Inconceivable back in the '70s. Today's cost-aware parents don't want their children learning to scan Latin verse (my big achievement in the Summer of Love); they want skillful examinees -- the best boarding schools always figure close to the top of the academic charts -- who might also make well-rounded adults.

What the BEA leaves discreetly unsaid, however, are the more questionable advantages that go with a boarding education. Education was always a class issue in Britain, and whatever the talk of meritocracy, the old snobberies survive just enough to matter. Pick the right school -- all the swankiest are still dominated by boarders -- and it'll still add some handy tone to a risumi.

The 30 percent of today's parents in Britain who never boarded know the score as well as any Hogwarts alumnus. The name of his old school won't necessarily guarantee Harry that job at Gringotts Bank, but it might help. No doubt there'll be a few other Gryffindors on the board.

Maybe it is true; if you get to them early enough, most kids will accept almost any way of life as "normal." But acceptance is a long way from enjoyment. Plucked from home and dropped, unsorted and without magic wands, into a round-the-clock educational regime, children become, in my mother's phrase, "polite strangers." (As I recall, the odd got odder and the sad got sadder.)

Conditions in real-world boarding schools may have improved, but better conditions won't render their unnatural circumstances natural. Muggles should proceed in full awareness of the truth: Lovely boy that he is, Harry Potter is a creature of fiction as rare as any centaur or house elf. And the same can be said of his beloved alma mater.

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