Spitz, L --- "Wands Away (or Preaching to Infidels Who Wear Earplugs)" [2008] LegEdDig 21; (2008) 16(2) Legal Education Digest 23

• Wands away (or preaching to infidels who wear earplugs)

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Wands away (or preaching to infidels who wear earplugs)

L Spitz

41 Law Teacher 3, 2007, pp 314–329

‘There now,’ said Professor Umbridge sweetly, ‘... Wands away and quills out, please’

Many of the class exchanged gloomy looks; the order ‘wands away’ had never yet been followed by a lesson they had found interesting.

Students in Professor Umbridge’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry want to do magic, not read about doing magic. Wizarding school provides the single experience that virtually all wizards and witches share. The same has been said about law school for lawyers, at least in the United States. Judging the success of any institution — muggle or magical — requires some understanding of its purpose. While it’s not possible to settle easily on a single definition of the purpose of law school, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has described law school this way: ‘[i]t is the place and time where expert knowledge and judgement are communicated from the advanced practitioner to beginner. It is where the profession puts its defining values and exemplars on display, and future practitioners can begin both to assume and critically examine their future identities.’

With few exceptions, Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is apparently successful. I say ‘Dumbledore’s Hogwarts’ because it is clear throughout the books that Hogwarts’ philosophy and approach to education can be attributed for the most part to the Headmaster’s stewardship. My claim is that law schools do well when they exhibit these same qualities, some of which I describe here.

First, Hogwarts is not a morally neutral enterprise and does not pretend otherwise. Students cannot, for example, simply take courses in the Dark Arts. Instead, they are schooled in Defense Against the Dark Arts, a course with explicitly ethical and political purposes.

Second, the Headmaster and most teachers show genuine concern for students’ welfare and development as human beings, understanding that students’ success as wizards and witches depends on their mental, emotional and physical well-being, as well as the health and welfare of their classmates.

At the same time, the Headmaster and most teachers exhibit an explicitly self-conscious understanding of the power Hogwarts possesses vis-à-vis students, and Dumbledore clearly see Hogwarts as having a sort of benevolent responsibility equal to this power. At a minimum, this responsibility includes an affirmative duty to fulfil (and inspire in students) a public service mission and to be honest about the inevitability of perspective.

Fourth, Hogwarts’ embraces an idealised, if not romanticised, notion of learning in a British boarding school setting — namely the time-honoured tradition of (mostly self-) discovery, within the (mostly safe) confines of the institution itself, together with the slow, steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge.

Finally, Hogwarts is clearly a collective enterprise. I say this in the same way that I would describe the legal profession — and law schools as institutional partners — as a collective enterprise. In that sense, individual students are part of a larger whole, to which they owe ethical obligations that are profession-defining.

Together, these qualities clearly make Hogwarts an impressive institution of higher learning — not perfect, but paradigmatic. Good law schools exhibit some or all of these same traits: explicit acknowledgement of the political, moral and collective nature of the enterprise; genuine commitment to students as human beings; and careful attention to the concomitant responsibilities that come with sanctioned institutional power.

Like all institutions of higher learning, Hogwarts is not brick and mortar, but people (and other creatures, as well).

Professor McGonagall is strict, honest, wise, knowledgeable, serious and exacting, but not unkind. She demonstrates unwavering — though not uncritical — loyalty to Dumbledore, Hogwarts and the Order of the Phoenix, at the same time that she shows genuine respect, interest and compassion for her students. But what really makes Professor McGonagall so uniquely wonderful as a teacher, a role model and a literary tool is that she is both the Transfiguration teacher and an Animagus (a witch who can transform herself into an animal). Perhaps nowhere at Hogwarts is it more plain than in Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration class that the intersection of practice and theory is being.

Professor Lupin is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for only one year. Nevertheless, it would seem that students of all ages and abilities believe Professor Lupin to have been the best teacher at Hogwarts. When pressed about the ‘why’ of this, answers include: ‘he shows an interest in all of the students,’ ‘he has respect for all of the students,’ his lessons are ‘practical,’ he is ‘prepared for teaching,’ and ‘he gives his students confidence and demonstrates that he has confidence in them.’ I not only agree with these observations, I would add to them my own: his approach to teaching enhances the learning experience for all students in the classroom and his lessons best exemplify the practical application of learned knowledge. And while Rowling (perhaps over-) emphasises the practical nature of Lupin’s lessons in an effort to show us why students like him, in fact Lupin does a great job of explaining how and why spells work as they do, and when and why they might be used.

Contrast this with Professor Dolores Umbridge who, like Professor Lupin, is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for only one year. Professor Umbridge is a caricature of all that is wrong with theory in the abstract. In the contemporary consumerist approach to education, the word ‘theory’ — particularly in the ‘abstract’ — is evocative of all things ‘bad,’ ‘irrelevant’ and ‘impractical’ with contemporary education.

Unsurprisingly, I do not think Professor Umbridge has anything to teach us about good teaching (except as a counterpoint to same). At no time does Rowling present Professor Umbridge as a sympathetic character and, unlike with Professor Snape, she does not give us different sides of Umbridge that might push on any ambiguities or allow for the possibility of redeeming features.

For a period of time, however, Professor Umbridge becomes the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts. During that time, I think it is safe to say that we are meant, as readers, to understand that Hogwarts is not operating at its full potential, nor for the benefit of students.

While this is true for many reasons, I believe one of the most revealing is Professor Umbridge’s Educational Decree Number Twenty-Six: ‘Teachers are hereby banned from giving students any information that is not strictly related to the subjects they are paid to teach.’ In Professor Umbridge’s view of education, students (and teachers) can and should be controlled by compartmentalising education, prohibiting certain kinds of speech, limiting academic freedom and creating an atmosphere of distrust. Courses (and students and teachers) can be neatly separated from one another and from the institutional ‘whole.’

At least two observations emerge from this. First, because Professor Umbridge is presented as unfailingly incompetent and ruthless, Rowling is able to make clear that Umbridge’s ideas — including her ideas about student-teacher communication — are similarly so. One thing I think most law teachers agree on is that the law school curriculum is somewhat artificially and inartfully divided up into connected, contingent and overlapping subjects, and we do our students a disservice when we fail to make those connections obvious. Courses are not so easily packaged nor contained. Legal problems are often messy and live somewhere in the intersections of various subject-matters. The best way to educate lawyers, then, is to highlight inter-curricular connections in law school.

Secondly, by presenting Umbridge as lacking judgement and ability in dividing and silencing students and teachers, Rowling is able to use Umbridge to reinforce her view that Hogwarts is at its best when students and teachers work together. While the twin objectives of group cohesion and free expression are sometimes in tension, neither can be abandoned if both are to be made possible.

There are several elementary observations that can be made about Professor Snape: he gives certain students preferential treatment; he is not only unfair, but mean, to others; he allows his personal feelings to compromise his commitment to students’ learning experiences; he takes the Socratic method to levels not even Langdell could have imagined; he is unpredictable and impatient in class; and he appears to enjoy using fear and humiliation as ways to teach and control students. None of these qualities makes for good pedagogy, regardless of whether the school is magic or muggle, law or something else — and regardless of whether Professor Snape is genuinely mean and bitter, is putting on an act in order to fool Lord Voldemort, or some combination.

I find myself unable to leave the subject of pedagogy without adding one final note. Law teachers throughout Canada and the United States are dealing with a relatively recent shift in the attitudes of many students. This shift is best described as a movement towards a more consumer-driven model of legal education. In that model, students are paying customers of law schools and therefore entitled to the courses and teachers they believe best meet their needs. Their needs, in turn, are market driven and self-determined. That students are best situated and entitled to decide their needs, and that market forces are inevitable, efficient and somehow external — and therefore point-of-viewless — are largely untested assumptions underpinning the model. While there are many things to be said about this shift, and the challenges posed by same, I want here to deal with only one. In an institution of higher learning — particularly one with both academic and professional missions — who is best suited or placed to decide how and what to teach? There is no easy answer, and a range of interests must be accounted for and met. That is, a wide variety of overlapping constituencies have something to say about the content and form of legal education, and while an institution cannot be all things to all people, it can certainly be many things to many people.

Nevertheless, the class of persons with the least experience and expertise — students — are probably not best suited to determine the form and content of their education. This is particularly true when students see themselves as consumers, with rights flowing therefrom. This is not to say students should have no voice, and we do well to listen to them on many issues, but ‘buying’ a legal education is not like buying a sofa. Knowledge is not bought, so much as acquired over time. And there must be a certain level of trust in, and respect for, the institutional and pedagogical choices made on students’ behalf. That is the very nature of education, and it is the Hogwarts model.

To be fair to students, legal education is expensive and the job market is just that — a market. It is unsurprising that this combination — together with larger social, political and economic forces more generally — creates an almost irresistible drive towards a more consumerist model. But the fundamental organising principle in education (and education reform) cannot be consumerism if education is to remain relevant, intellectually rich, and useful. And difficult though it may be for some students to imagine, it might be that teachers and administrators are well-situated to make decisions about pedagogy, including both content and methods of instruction.

In The Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore sacrifices his right to stay at Hogwarts to keep Harry and other members of the D.A. in school. When asked why a wizard as successful and powerful as he would choose to teach, Dumbledore responds in The Half-Blood Prince: ‘To a wizard such as myself, there can be nothing more important than passing on ancient skills, helping hone young minds.’ In those two moments, Rowling succinctly conveys her feeling about education (essential) and educators (noble). In that view, it is no wonder we (teachers) might be drawn to the Harry Potter books. But there is something more there than simple reassurance that we have made the right decision in becoming teachers. Rowlings’ Hogwarts offers us metaphors, paradigms and methods that serve as useful (and fun) platforms for discussing institutional and individual teaching decisions, and examining the ways in which theory, skills, doctrine and ethics intersect at the practice of ‘being a lawyer’ and ‘doing law.’ Legal education — like magical education — requires constant re-evaluation and self- reflection. Happily, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry provides one such opportunity for lawyers and wizards alike.