From the Editor: How Do We Explain That to the Kids?

Author: Shuffelton, Amy

Shuffelton, Amy. “From the Editor: How Do We Explain That to the Kids?” Educational Theory, vol. 67, no. 1, Feb. 2017, pp. 5–8. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/edth.12221.

It has been a season of asking, “How do we explain that to the kids?” It seems to me like an unusually difficult question this year, and likewise to other adults I know, but maybe that's because most of us have actual children pestering us with questions about why police officers shoot black men so often, why voters elected a presidential candidate who bragged about assaulting women, and why there is a civil war in Syria. Because every morning when the paper lands on the breakfast table, it seems like there is some new ethical and political conundrum to explain. But in all fairness, this is not a new question for grown‐ups, and maybe it always feels uniquely complicated. Regardless of newspapers and breakfast tables, adults have to figure out how to balance a healthy dose of reality with the need to perpetuate some optimism in the explanations we offer. My students and I talk about this every semester when we read Plato's Republic, with black and Latino students quick to point out that many children in the United States do not have the option of hearing only tales of moral virtue. There can be no whitewashing of authority figures if your life depends on knowing to keep both hands on the steering wheel when pulled over by the police. And yet, as we also discuss, the family members who explained racism to their eight‐year‐olds also had to keep some sense of the goodness of the world, or at least the prospect of goodness, alive. Hannah Arendt famously put this tension at the core of her essay “The Crisis in Education,” which ends with her calling education “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.” [ 1]

That still leaves hanging the question of how actually to carry this off. At present, I am too perplexed to offer any insights. The question has, however, drawn my attention to the stories we are telling children these days. If you shifted your attention from political mayhem to the arts this summer, or if you spent any amount of time talking to school‐aged children, you are no doubt aware that one thing we are telling them is yet another story about Harry Potter. In July, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play about the adventures of Harry's son Albus Severus Potter at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, opened in London, with the script available for purchase by those of us unable to make it into the audience.[ 2] If this seems like a shift to the trivial, bear with me, because children's moral and political education is as much at the heart of this new story as it was at the heart of the novels.

Harry and his friends, it turns out, may have been wildly successful at fighting giant spiders and evil wizards and then going on to forge happy marriages and pursue satisfying careers, but raising children proves an unexpectedly daunting challenge. In fact, Albus, the star of this new story, is a constant worry to himself and his parents: unpopular at school, academically unsuccessful, uncooperative and surly. Harry is baffled; the complete demolition of the most powerful dark wizard of all time turns out to be a cakewalk in comparison to raising an adolescent. Yet Harry's travails as a parent are only one way in which children's moral and political education is at the heart of the play. Like the novels that preceded it — like all the stories adults carefully compose for children, whether orally, or as books, or movies, or songs — this play advises children on how to make sense of the world and its problems. It merits our attention because, if Harry Potter's popularity is any indication, these are stories to which children are paying close attention, whether or not they consciously recognize the ethical and political framework they are imbibing alongside the escapades and battles.

What stood out to me about this play is that it breaks with the seven Harry Potter novels' reiteration of a narrative of how human goodness can prevail in politics. In this familiar narrative, a small band of friends committed to recognizably modern goods, including human rights, the rule of law in lieu of naked power, and an abhorrence of cruelty, joins together to fight a powerful opponent of these goods. Through solidarity and the willingness of each to sacrifice his or her own comfort and even life to the cause, these ideals are upheld in a fight with a politically savvy nemesis whose ambition is to establish world domination. Historian Matthew Cobb argues that this narrative is, arguably, the most important legacy of the French Resistance in World War II. The Resistance itself did limited damage to the Nazi war machine, only a tiny minority of the French were involved, and, as revisionist historians of the 1970s and 1980s pointed out, its heroes were imperfect, but the story itself mattered and continues to matter to the French. “Despite the very French nature of the Resistance,” furthermore, “it soon became a powerful symbol all around the world,” Cobb points out. British and American television and movies told versions of the story, with the Americans projecting the Resistance into outer space in dramas like Star Wars, “portraying groups of brave rebels fighting against evil, thereby fusing the Resistance with the American national myth, the rebellion against the British.” [ 3] Harry Potter, books 1 through 7, is yet another iteration. What makes the story travel and last, as Cobb sees, is that it raises “some of the most important human characteristics — courage, self‐sacrifice, betrayal and struggle.” [ 4] Locate it in the Warsaw Ghetto instead, if you will, or Selma, Alabama, or South Africa. The story matters.

The original Harry Potter novels presume that this is still a good story to tell children. The political world that Rowling's novels portray resembles mid‐to‐late twentieth century politics. The threat is of dictators, motivated by personal ambition, who use state institutions such as the police force, state‐controlled media, and the school system to repress human rights and to silence, imprison, or kill their opponents. In the commencement speech she gave at Harvard College in 2008, Rowling said that “one of the greatest formative experiences of [her] life” was her job at Amnesty International's headquarters in London, where she worked in the Africa department. She encountered political refugees who had experienced the kinds of intimidation that her books portray Voldemort as perpetrating. Rowling was inspired, however, by those who stood up to the threats and by her coworkers at Amnesty (who were in many cases one and the same), and this is what she advised the graduating college students to do. “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” [ 5] In other words, as her audience had no doubt been hoping for years, you too can be Harry Potter, if you have the courage and imagination to try.

In the years since Rowling worked at Amnesty International, however, the political mayhem that scares adults has appeared less in the guise of an evil strongman using state institutions to work his will, and more as impersonal forces of disorder. Police brutality, the spread of demagoguery and misinformation via the Internet, and international terrorism come about through the actions of individuals, but what makes them hard to grapple with, ironically, is that they involve the same kind of decentralized authority that resistance groups used successfully in the twentieth century. These threats that contemporary children hear about from the grown‐ups seem to call for new narratives — not as prescriptions for our childrento follow but as motivational tales.

Rowling's new story (cowritten with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany) does in fact discard the resistance myth, although whether the alternative she suggests is indeed how to explain things to the kids remains a question. In the play, the grown‐ups explicitly tell the children not to turn to the kind of resistance‐era heroism that worked for Harry and his friends. At one point, headmaster Minerva McGonagall scolds two generations of characters for embarking on brave but risky adventures. “Your intentions,” she tells Albus and his friend Scorpius, who have been summoned with their parents after their misadventures have made matters worse, “were honorable, even if misguided. And it does sound as if you were brave … but the lesson even your father sometimes failed to heed is that bravery doesn't forgive stupidity. Always think. Think what's possible.” [ 6] The new play involves time travel, in which the present can turn out significantly worse than it might otherwise have been. Since not all bad outcomes can be prevented, the story tells children, the best we can hope for might be for the world just not to be sadder and more dangerous than it is. Toward this end, this celebration of pragmatic realpolitik over idealism, young people are told, in a nutshell: Just don't mess it up.

I read the script a few weeks after the Brexit vote, with Donald Trump's July rise in the polls making the front pages of the newspapers, which is to say a few months before Colombian voters rejected a peace plan that would have ended a decades‐long civil war with FARC revolutionaries and before Trump's election. None of these recent rejections of what the “grown‐ups” in the EU, the Republican Party, and the Colombian negotiating team recommended can be pinned on the young. Brexit supporters, like Donald Trump's supporters, were mostly older citizens (who have chafed at being treated like children by the financial and political elite), and the Colombian vote seems to have varied more by geography than age. The young, if they bear any responsibility for Brexit and Trump, bear it only for not stepping in with their votes to keep the values of international cooperation and tolerance from taking more damage than they otherwise might. Through the lens of idealism, the European Union and post‐civil rights American democracy look like flawed compromises that the young have little reason to be fired up about, but the generations who worked hard to achieve a lasting peace and the rule of law are aware how much worse matters could have turned out. Please, Rowling seems to tell our children in this play, love the world we have created enough not to mess it up.

“Think what's possible” and don't make matters worse strikes me as not unreasonable advice but also far from the “coming of the new and the young” that Arendt envisions. Keep your hands on the steering wheel. But surely that cannot be the sum of it? As a child of the twentieth century myself, I liked the old story better, even as I wonder whether it has outlived its usefulness as an ethical primer for political agency. I am right back where I started, of course — what do we tell the kids? — but then, the search for answers to questions like that is why we continue to engage with Educational Theory. I hope you enjoy this issue.

Footnotes

1 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 196.

2 J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts 1 and 2 (New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 2016).

3 Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 292.

4 Ibid.

5 The full text of the speech is published in the Harvard Gazette: J. K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” Harvard Gazette, June 5, 2008, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/.

6 Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, 201.

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By Amy Shuffelton

AMY SHUFFELTON is Assistant Professor of Education at Loyola University Chicago, 820 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611; e‐mail. Her primary areas of scholarship are parental involvement in public schooling, gender identity, and gun violence in schools.

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