Reading, Writing, Rowling

Investigate bullying at Hogwarts on this month’s episode. In this episode, Emily and Katy talk with Ithaca College’s Katharine Kittredge and Carolyn Rennie about the history of bullying and how it relates to the social and educational environment at Hogwarts. We talk about what makes a bully and how that conception has perhaps changed over time in the western world. Katharine explains how eighteenth-century writers tended to think of bullying as natural to children and inevitable in the school setting, especially where differences of privilege existed. The nineteenth century revised that view to consider bullying as a deviant behavior or the result of a problem in the bully’s psychology, which is more like our view today. Carolyn discusses the modern and feminine forms of bullying, especially facilitated by social media, and the volatile context in which kids can be both bullied and bullies depending on the situation at any given moment. The Harry Potter stories’ relationship to Tom Brown’s School Days