Why Hogwarts Still Haunts - and Enchants - the Imagination
A Rebuke to Modern Schooling
Is Hogwarts — the school of witchcraft and wizardry in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series — just a charming fantasy setting? Or is it, beneath the spells and talking portraits, a quietly subversive argument about what education ought to be?
I would suggest the latter.
Look carefully, and you'll see that Hogwarts is not simply a backdrop for adolescent adventures. It is a deliberate affirmation of a vision of schooling that flies in the face of contemporary trends.
In an age where education is increasingly bureaucratic, flattened, sanitized, and marketed through slogans like innovation, relevance, fun, and future skills, Hogwarts stands as a fierce, fictional rebuke.
At Hogwarts, the school environment is not a corporate office park or a mall-with-classrooms. Education is not a customer service industry. It is a rite of passage. It is demanding, uncomfortable, occasionally dangerous. It is steeped in ancient tradition: Latin mottos, heraldry, stone corridors, scrolls, house rivalries, robes, solemn ceremonies. Its architecture, its furnishings do not flatter teenage sensibilities; it confronts them. Students do not "design their own learning journeys" — they submit to a strange, storied world far bigger and older than themselves.
This is the secret of Hogwarts’ allure. Rowling understands that adolescence craves not endless choice and digital spectacle, but initiation into mysteries, traditions, and hierarchies that demand courage, loyalty, and moral growth. Hogwarts offers students not empowerment but enchantment. Not validation but challenge. Not shallow positivity but the risk of failure, exclusion, and — occasionally — mortal danger.
It is precisely through these dark, solemn, and seemingly “outdated” forms that Rowling suggests true growth occurs. In a culture that treats tradition as stuffy and seriousness as boring, oppressive - Harry Potter dares to propose the opposite: tradition is the gateway to wonder. Cold stone corridors, dusty libraries, ancient scrolls, and arcane rituals are not dead relics — they are invitations.
Modern schools often strip away the aesthetics of solemnity and permanence in a desperate bid to appear "relevant", to appear “engaging” to adolescents and their parents. Hogwarts preserves them, and by doing so reveals their enduring potency.
That’s why Hogwarts haunts the imagination long after graduation.
It offers a vision of school not as a service to please us, but as a world to shape us.
Let the modern education bureaucrats tremble. The old magic still works.
From Hogwarts to Disneypop High: How Schools Betray Themselves in the Name of “Fun” and “Engagement”
Picture Hogwarts—not the real Hogwarts of Rowling’s imagination, but Hogwarts as it would appear to today’s jittery school administrators, boards of governors, and brand consultants, all obsessed with enrolment numbers and terrified of being called “outdated.”
They don’t see ancient stone corridors imbued with mystery and dignity. They don’t see the weight of history or the slow, serious work of education. They see dead space.
Too grey.
Too quiet.
Too boring.
Not fun enough. Not enough stimulation.
Up the road, Disneypop High is booming. They got neon murals about kindness, TikTok challenges at break, and a Senior Leadership Team who wear sequinned jackets for staff dance-offs at Open Day. There’s mood lighting, a smoothie bar, and beanbags in every corner. And, of course, the loudspeakers rotate a carefully curated playlist of empowerment anthems for the vibes.
The Hogwarts governors look at this and panic. “Why aren’t we doing this? Why does our atrium look so… institutional?”
Someone whispers the cursed phrase:
“We need to modernize.”
And so it begins: the slow, tragic death of mystery, magic and seriousness. Out go the symbols of tradition, reverence, and intellectual gravity. In come slogans, razzmatazz, and Instagrammable moments.
Gravitas? Out. Glitter? In.
Ritual? Out. Relevance? In.
Sanctity? Out. Spectacle? In.
Because nothing terrifies today’s education bureaucrats more than the possibility that children—or their fee-paying parents—might find something “boring.”
But here’s the truth they won’t hear: children do not come to Hogwarts to be entertained. They come to be formed.
They come for seriousness, difficulty, dignity, mystery. For the silent corridors. For the weight of expectations far greater than themselves. They come because Hogwarts doesn’t pander to them. It expects them to grow up.
The administrators think they’re saving the school by making it more “fun.”
They are, in fact, killing it.
Because the more you strip away austerity, sacredness, and tradition in your bid to compete with Disneypop Corporate High, the more you reveal the sad truth: you no longer remember why your institution exists anymore.
And once that’s gone, no amount of razzmatazz can save you.