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I said a while back that I consider JK Rowling the modern day Laura Ingalls Wilder. In that their works both romanticized institutions which living memory showed were far less ideal and rather fucked up in reality (for Rowling it British boarding, for Wilder it was American Pioneer Homesteading).

same! I'll never forget that boy who had soap shavings put in his mouth while snoring

I seem to recall Pink Floyd had some feelings regarding English education.

Horrific tales heard from close friends. Lord of the flies and worse…

I attended a British-style boarding school in New Zealand in 1979, as a day boy, and yeah Hogwarts is the Disneyfied version of one of those places. We were constantly belittled and threatened by teachers à la Snape and there was a ton of bullying. It was single-sex, too, which made it MUCH worse.

ok so back in the day I remember you recorded a super good harry potter fan song though (way before we knew about Joanne being ontologically evil)

You’re *supposed* to brutally repress your gender feelings and deal with them by means of terrorizing and brutalizing small children as a boarding school instructor, apparently

I read of Wackford Squeers before I did Dumbledore.

Possible! It's been 60 years since I read it.

….despite what the golden age of Harry Potter fanfic may have led some to believe

It’s the British naval tradition with less rum.

Oh dear

I feel like if anything this is maybe what the character of Filch is supposed to represent, is the cruelty of the schools. He’s always trying to do physically abusive shit to the kids

Well I think they've tamped down the corporal punishment a bit since Dahl's day.

I knew a few people at uni who'd been through that system. Mostly it seemed to make them heartless and quite keen on petty cruelty. They considered wrapping the school minibus in cling film hilarious. Meanwhile at my state school we were helping mend the thing when it broke down on a trip!

In Britain we read the Molesworth books, in which the school is not at all elite. I guess Americans don't know about really average, dreary British boarding schools?

Christopher Hitchens and so many more. Why the Royals are sending their children there instead of burning them down and actually salting the earth is beyond me.

There's Cyril Connolly from between the Wars as well (a contemporary of George Orwell, who also wrote of the horrors of Eton).

Pratchett's mention of Hugglestones ("a place that made men out of boys, a process that invariably entailed some wastage") and Capt. Blouse's fond reminiscences of boarding-school food certainly came from somewhere

"oh, so this is what the horror school was like for the popular kids"

But who protects you from the other kids? Conventional school messed me up.

Rudyard Kipling's "Stalky and Co." stories are pretty awful too, seen from a present-day perspective. He wrote them when he was nearing middle age, a couple of decades later, so he may have been feeling nostalgic by then and glossed over some of the worst stuff.

So horrifying that it almost - almost - makes one sympathize with Dahl.

Trying to think of other examples and I have so many, it's such a central cultural thing for us. But it was always presented critically, as something we've thankfully moved on from, obvs this is not the case with JKR.

Robert Graves's account of his boarding school days is similarly grim. Contrast that with Kipling's Stalky and Co--which was one of my Etonian uncle's favorite novels. Uncle David was at Eton just before WW2 and who knows...he may genuinely have enjoyed it. He did so in memory.

yeah I was raised on enough British literature as a kid that I did not find Hogwarts to be particularly thrillingly exotic

A friend's husband was traumatized by an American knockoff that minutely copied all the worst British boarding school tropes. When the place closed down he, now middle-aged, traveled over 1000 miles just to piss on the front door.

Oh, Flashman…

Yeah, I saw IF… at a ridiculously young age and it cured me of romanticizing the boarding school genre completely.