Miss Granger’s Intelligence

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

“When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own….


Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes, think of the odds
or shrug them off forever!

… Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition…”

from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” by Adrienne Rich, 1958-60




In sexist circles, there was an interesting evolution over time in the disparagement of women’s intelligence—not in that it was disparaged as less than men’s, but how. Way back when almost all women were illiterate, it was common to claim that women were less capable than men of learning, that we simply lacked men’s higher mental functions. When it became common for girls to be taught to read, it was decided that we were capable of rote learning but not critical thinking. (Milton, author of that stirring call for freedom of thought, the Areopagitica, taught his daughters to pronounce Latin and Greek so they could read texts to him, but did not allow them to learn what the sounds they made meant.) When most girls were only educated to sixth or eighth grade levels, it was argued that high school would be too hard for our weak little minds. But then when girls did start going on to high school in larger numbers, we, oddly, did well there. However, it was mostly boys who went on to college because college would be too intellectually rigorous for girls and we didn’t need it anyway to be a good wife-and-mother. Then girls started going to college in nearly equal numbers as did boys, and…

And this is about where both Jo and I came in, you see.

When Jo and I were in our late teens, the sexist party line about women’s intellectual inferiority had become: okay, girls often got better grades than boys even in college because we were more docile and retentive. But boys had more true intelligence, because they were creative whereas girls were merely good at regurgitating information that their betters had discovered.

Now, you have to understand: as a feminist from about age 19, I formally, consciously disavowed such sexist teachings.

But for myself… well, I didn’t go on to grad school in part because I was terrified of proving that it might be true, that being top of the class didn’t mean I would be incapable of original work.

And, of course, believing that it was so, it was so: I didn’t attempt what I thought of as original research. And I consistently underrated the creativity in the intellectual work that I did do (college papers, writing, computer programming) because I knew that I lacked the capacity for originality.

Er, right. But I really did think that, and as a very young woman I did let that belief constrain my choices.

Moreover, I can attest that there is actually a very good reason to recite the book rather than present one’s own conclusions (besides, of course, that of having no conclusions of one’s own worth presenting). Answering a question by quoting the book means one can’t get the answer wrong. If one simultaneously lacks self-confidence and bases her fragile self-worth on being smart, “not being wrong” is worth almost any stifling of one’s originality.

Does this remind you of any of Jo’s characters?

Now back up to look at the smart boys in the Potter books: Albus, whose magical innovations had him corresponding with adult researchers—to their awed delight, we are told—from age fourteen or so. Gellert, expelled from Durmstrang at sixteen for “twisted experiments.” Tom, who at age eleven was experienced at inventing ways to hurt and control those around him. The Prince’s creative little jinxes and constant improvements to potions recipes. The Marauders, creating their Map. The Weasley twins and their Wheezes.

In fact, the only male teen character in the Potterverse who is presented as clearly very smart but not creative is Percy Weasley. Whose great flaw is the feminine weakness of liking rules and order rather too much. And who is a “Mamma’a boy.”

Now look at the (few) smart girls and women we see. Minerva, supremely competent in her field but never credited with innovations in it. “Loony” Lovegood, whose brilliance is marred by terminal eccentricity (and whom we never see create anything except weird jewelry). Lily-Sue, floating from a swing and opening flowers as a child, credited by Horace with “intuitive” brilliance in potions-making, but never shown writing or producing anything of significance (slattern thought?). Bellatrix, mistress of Dark magic—but again, mastering known spells, never creating her own. And, of course, Miss Granger.

In fact, I only remember one citation in canon itself (not interviews, websites, etc.) about a witch doing original magical research: Luna’s mother.

“She was a quite extraordinary witch, but she did like to experiment and one of her spells went rather badly wrong one day.”

The key word in that statement is “but.” Mrs. Lovegood’s interest in experimenting was counter to her being “an extraordinary witch,” not an intrinsic (perhaps, defining?) part of it as the Prince’s or young Dumbledore’s was.

On cannot imagine any witch or wizard saying, “Dumbledore was quite an extraordinary wizard, BUT he did things with a wand I’d never seen before,” or “Without the Prince I’d never have won the Felix Felicis, BUT he did like to experiment….”

And notice that the witch killed herself by her experimenting, as none of the wizards did.

Which gender is a witch, and which a wizard, again? Remind me, please; I think I may have lost track.


I think Ms. Rowling’s internalized sexism is showing again.


Finally, regarding Miss Granger’s actual intelligence: it can only be inferred from her actions, and one’s actions are determined by one’s socialization as well as by one’s underlying potential.


I think that (like myself at a like age) Hermione’s overwhelming insecurity would make her feel safer regurgitating books than venturing to present her own thoughts. Her insecurity is attested to in canon (and sorting to anti-intellectual Gryffindor reinforced it. “Books! And cleverness! There are more important things….” This is NOT the motto of House Ravenclaw.).

So Hermione’s canon tendency to rely on quoting her texts is not in itself proof she hasn’t the capacity to think critically and originally.


As a teen I loved math classes, and equations in my science classes, because equations all have one right answer, and if you approach the problem correctly you can always achieve that right answer. Always, for the questions posed in high school texts. Whereas the fuzzier classes sometimes raised questions that didn’t have a right answer, which made me anxious.

What was Hermione’s favorite subject again? And, er, her least?

And, while we don’t see Hermione ever attempting to create a brand-new spell (unless the D.A.’s cursed parchment was), she has no problems adapting spells to perform new functions—using the theory behind the Dark Mark to make charmed galleons, for instance. And she’s the Trio’s problem-solver. Which requires creativity, but doesn’t require one to be overtly creative. (As making a career designing software required creativity, but didn’t require me to admit to it.)

So if Hermione at the end of DH were a real eighteen-year-old girl worrying about whether she possessed “true” (creative) intelligence, or were just good at regurgitating books, I’d probably reassure her that she has already shown herself to be perfectly capable of original and critical thinking, and that she just needs to trust herself more (and perhaps books less). And maybe to give up the crutch of trying always to venture only “the right answer,” when sometimes there are more than one, or none.


I agree that Hermione can be read as the author’s failed attempt to write a character substantially brighter than herself. But Hermione can also be read convincingly as a subconscious sexist’s classic caricature of a bright “girl”—good memory, but intrinsically second-rate—a wholly derivative thinker! (Particularly as almost all the bright male characters, good and bad, are portrayed as strongly creative.) But I think the character can also, and perhaps most interestingly, be read as a depiction of a truly gifted girl hobbled by her own insecurities and socialization.


Thoughts?

Comments

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

You know, I was just thinking- I might be totally off, but does it seem to anybody else that Hermione enjoys learning less for itself and more because she is insecure and needs something to make other people respect her.

I may have told this story before, but this reminds me of a girl I went to school with.

Sue was one of The Brains of our class; she'd schlep a stack of books home every night almost as tall as she was. She all her classes were AP, and she usually got straight A's, and would consider herself a failure if she got a B in a class.

She was especially good in math and science, and we all expected her to go onto an Ivy League college, or MIT, she definitely had the grades for it.

Therefore you can understand our surprise when, at the end of senior year, she told us that she was going to nursing school at a local hospital. Not that there is anything wrong with nursing (altho the profession DID have a bad rep back in those days), but this school was for LPN licensing, not RN. It just seemed like such a step down for Sue.

Well, she didn't even complete a semester before dropping out. Got a job waitressing. Lost touch with her after she moved in with a drug dealer.

A couple of years later a mutual friend came from out of town to visit. Virginia was a year older than Sue and I, but Sue had been in many classes with Virginia because of being an AP student.

We got to talking about old times and old friends, and the subject of Sue came up, and I was expressing my opinion that it was such a shame that such a smart girl would throw her life away like she did.

And Virginia stared directly into my eyes and said, "Sue wasn't that smart." I was flabbergasted, and protested that of course she was smart, look at the grades she got!

And Virginia explained that she and Sue often were paired up as partners in various classes, and that Sue breezed thru math and science because those subjects required set facts as answers. But apparantly Sue had quite a problem with the "soft" subjects, and Virginia revealed that Sue actually not only hated English, Literature, History, and anything to do with the arts, she strongly disparaged them. Because, according to Virginia, those subjects required Sue to actually THINK, rather than memorize and regurgitate facts.

Knowing what Sue's family life was like, both parents were in academia and so probably always encouraged learning, but her father was a really cold bastard who demanded perfection. So I guess Sue sought, if not affection or even approval, at least acceptance from her father by producing good grades, but at the expense of really LEARNING anything. And once out of public school, immediately rebelled by having a very sad life.

She actually worked as a temp in the IT department I was working in, filling in for a secretary who was out on medical leave. Yep, the girl who we all thought was MIT material ten years later was working as a secretary for a temp agency. She'd had two kids by the drug dealer (never married) who was at that time in jail, and was now living with some guy who didn't work, but she insisted that he shouldn't have to contribute any of his SSI check to her because "they're my kids, not his"...

I pointed out that he was sharing the roof over their heads, and enjoying heat in the winter, and running water, and electricity to watch the TV that he apparantly was plopped in front of all day...but she still didn't see why he should have to pay anything towards rent or utilities. She paid for the food he ate, too.

So yeah, for all the A's she got in school, she was pretty dumb.

[oryx_leucoryx]

And Virginia explained that she and Sue often were paired up as partners in various classes, and that Sue breezed thru math and science because those subjects required set facts as answers. But apparantly Sue had quite a problem with the "soft" subjects, and Virginia revealed that Sue actually not only hated English, Literature, History, and anything to do with the arts, she strongly disparaged them. Because, according to Virginia, those subjects required Sue to actually THINK, rather than memorize and regurgitate facts.

As a scientist I must protest this. A system where one succeeds in math and science because one isn't required to *think* is messed up. Science is an immensely creative endeavor. Math too, but not necessarily at the secondary level (though even there proofs, constructions, integrations the moment you go beyond the trivial there is some serious thinking). If at the highest level that science is taught in US high schools one isn't expected to design methods to study a new problem the system is in worse trouble than I thought.

[sunnyskywalker]

I'll second that. Anyone who tries to solve Descartes's four-line locus problem with no ability to think creatively is screwed. Hell, all I had to do was follow his proof well enough to demonstrate it without notes and that took creativity, because when you are blanking out because you're standing in front of a room full of people and have social anxiety, the ability to look at all the lines and get your memory back by figuring out what the next step must be is crucial. And there are a bunch of lines, so it isn't obvious; it's kind of like a magic eye picture where you have to look at just the right parts the right way to see where you're going.

I also had a science class where, before teaching us how the theories developed over time, they would turn us loose in a woody area and tell us to invent classification systems for all the plants we saw, and try to figure out how to classify the mystery substances we were dealing with based on smell, taste, color when burned, etc. That way we could appreciate exactly what went into scientific discoveries, and hopefully learn to think a bit. This was a required college class, though; my high school classes had a lot more memorizing and not much designing. We did observations, but only after we'd been told how to set up the experiment. (For context, this was ten years ago at a fairly academically rigorous school in California.) This might be connected to the way the whole educational system is set up to make sure you can fill in the right bubble on tests, but I don't think that can take all the blame.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

This might be connected to the way the whole educational system is set up to make sure you can fill in the right bubble on tests, but I don't think that can take all the blame.

Back in my day they weren't teaching to standardized tests, the teachers were just lazy. At least in my school system.

The attitude was "Put up and shut up"; any class that encouraged students to think, and therefore discuss, anything made the class more "difficult". Most of the teachers therefore just preferred to teach to the textbook, and test us on what was in the textbook, whether it was science, math, history, whatever.

Hell, in the spring of my sophomore year I was called into my guidance counselor's office shortly after I'd handed in my selections for classes for my junior year.

I'd taken something called "Personal Typing" in my freshman year. That hadn't gotten any questions because all students who were expected to go on to college were encouraged to take this class, which lasted only half a year.

And nothing had been said when I'd signed up for a full year of "Typing 1" in my sophomore year.

But now my guidance counselor was concerned that for my junior year, not only was I taking a full year of "Typing 2", but a full year of "Accounting 1" and a full year of "Shorthand 1".

Because, according to her, I was "too smart" to be taking business classes. Only less intelligent girls took business classes, because no one expected them to go to college, not even junior college or a business college. Those girls, "everyone" knew, would have to work for a living for the few years after high school graduation until their eventual marriage (another "given"), whereupon everyone knew they'd quit working outside the home to be a fulltime wife and mother.

I, OTOH, was "too smart", I should plan on going to college. I told her I agreed, and that I DID plan to go to college. She didn't seem to hear me, and instead dragged out my 4th grade IQ test to show me that I tested at genius level at the age of nine. Why was I therefore "wasting" my time taking business classes?

Because, I explained, I wanted to get a degree in accounting, and then perhaps go on for an MBA. I gave her the name of a very well-known college that specialized in business subjects, especially accounting, that I was looking at.

The look on her face was such that if she'd suddenly found out that I was half-Martian, I could not have been more alien to her.

So she started reiterating her spiel regarding me being too smart for business subjects (in those days if you were female and considered smart, you went to college, but only to major in teaching or liberal arts)...

Finally I asked her, "Are you saying only stupid people go into business?" She didn't have an answer.

Bottom line was, I needed a parents' signature to approve my selections, my mother had seen what I'd selected and was fine with it (she'd been a Head Bookkeeper herself before marriage), so the guidance counselor couldn't force me to change my selections.

I dropped out of Shorthand midterm, after getting a pink slip in it -- first pink slip I'd ever gotten in my life. I thought I'd get hollered at, but my mother just laughed when she saw it and said she'd flunked shorthand too, and she signed the form requesting my withdrawal from the class without hesitation.

But I got an A+ in accounting, and B's and C's in typing; the requirements for typing were quite strict and the only way to get an "A" by the end of "Typing 3" (yes, I took another year of typing in my senior year), was to be able to type 120+ words a minute -- fastest I ever got was 85-90 wpm. I laugh nowadays when people see me going at it typing on a computer keyboard and are amazed at how "fast" I am...and I know that if I'm doing 65 wpm I'm lucky, and that would have been a "D" grade in typing class.

And quite frankly, of all the classes I took in 4 years of high school, the only worthwhile subjects that have stuck with me, and were useful, were those typing and accounting classes! LOL

[sunnyskywalker]

Either way, teaching to a test - just internal vs. externally imposed ones. Possibly some of your lazy teachers got promoted to positions where they could impose their methods on whole districts for my generation... Although frankly, the public school system idea in the 19th century was designed to make good little obedient citizens of us, so it probably just hasn't changed much ever since. (Hell, it's common for students to take a loyalty oath at the beginning of every day. That's the kind of thing we sneer at when other countries do it.)

My mother also took typing and did very well in it - and her teacher was so disappointed that she wanted to go to college, of all the useless ideas, when with her skills she could get a good job as a secretary right after graduation. Business classes definitely weren't seen as for the college bound at her school either. (And then she went to nursing school and then went back and got her master's degree, and her teacher would probably have a heart attack at how much more money she makes doing that then she would have as a secretary.) She made sure my sister and I did those Mavis Beacon typing programs growing up so we'd at least have that useful skill no matter what else we did or didn't learn :D I hit around 65 words a minute when I'm trying, which is still only 2/3 of what my mom can manage, but I get the same thing about how I can type "fast."

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

(Hell, it's common for students to take a loyalty oath at the beginning of every day. That's the kind of thing we sneer at when other countries do it.)

Do they still do that in schools? We stopped saying the Pledge in my sophomore year, and by mid-junior year were refusing to stand for the Anthem. But that was circa 1968-70, and it was our way to protest the Vietnam War.

But to this day I refuse to say the Pledge, at least as it's written. I pledge my allegiance to the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, NOT to a piece of cloth. If I feel I'm in a situation where I have to say the pledge, I just quickly say "the Constitution and Bill of Rights", instead of "flag".

My mother also took typing and did very well in it - and her teacher was so disappointed that she wanted to go to college, of all the useless ideas, when with her skills she could get a good job as a secretary right after graduation. Business classes definitely weren't seen as for the college bound at her school either.

I never understood the attitude that it was okay for a college-bound student to learn just enough typing so that they didn't have to "hunt-and-peck", but not learn it well enough that they could whip out termpapers in no time flat -- and perhaps make a little money by typing fellow students' papers.

And I'd like to know just what profession -- ANY profession -- that a college graduate would go onto where being able to type well wouldn't have been advantageous.

I hit around 65 words a minute when I'm trying, which is still only 2/3 of what my mom can manage, but I get the same thing about how I can type "fast."

It amazes me -- I really thought that with the advent of home computers, with their much more sensitive keyboards, that higher typing speeds would become the norm. Try achieving a WPM average of 90 on a MANUAL typewriter (the minimum requirement for an "A" in Typing 1 in my day), or a WPM average of 120+ on an electric typewriter (whose keys were more sensitive than a manual typewriter, but were still pretty clunky compared to today's computer keyboards).

The best I could achieve in Typing 1 on a well-tuned manual was around 50 wpm, which garnered me a C. At the end of Typing 2 (first year on electric typewriters), I was able to do around 75-80, which got me a B. At the end of Typing 3 I was averaging around 90-100 wpm, which got me a C+.

[sunnyskywalker]

I didn't have to after about 8th grade, and I think sometimes they might have forgotten or not bothered in elementary school - but yes, my classes usually said the Pledge at least sometimes from kindergarten up through sixth grade, in the 1990s. I'm not a fan of swearing loyalty to cloth rather than principles either, and especially am not a fan of how it's used politically (like sticking the "under God" bit in in 1954 to prove we weren't "Godless communists").

I also don't understand why you wouldn't want college students to be expert typists, or at least good ones - maybe it was designed as a big racket to create a market for the non-college students to hire out to type up the term papers? Or to give the male students' young wives something to do?

We did learn typing in school, but only in elementary school; I think after that the teachers just assumed we knew what we were doing, and we didn't have to type in class so it's not like they'd know even if we were still hunting and pecking. I was just lucky (not that I thought so at the time, of course!) that my mother made me practice typing as summer homework. (Nothing like imaginary bugs splatting on your imaginary windshield every time you make a mistake to motivate you. Plus Mavis Beacon would be so disappointed in you.) My mom still had a manual typewriter that I played with sometimes, so I can imagine how much harder that would be.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

As a scientist I must protest this. A system where one succeeds in math and science because one isn't required to *think* is messed up.

Which pretty much sums up the school system I had to attend, at least how it was back 40-something years ago...

This was a school system where my 9th grade French teacher couldn't get the most rudimentary rules of French grammar thru to us students. He found out why when he tried explaining the same concepts as applied to the English language, and was met with a classroom of blank stares.

Because in (until that point) 9+ years of schooling, WE HAD NEVER BEEN TAUGHT ENGLISH GRAMMAR! Which is something that to this day I feel insecure about, and will readily admit to the incorrect positioning of prepositions, misuse of commas, and insecurity about the use of "it's" and "its" (I think I know the difference, but I always have to stop and think when using either one)...

So what DID we do in "English" class? We read books. We'd read a book, we'd take a test on said book, and then we'd be assigned another book to read. Sometimes we read plays, usually Shakespeare, since we had the American Shakespeare Theater in town and they did a discounted student season every year, sometimes we'd read Shaw.

Math, Science, and History classes were basically a series of "Memorize these facts because you'll be tested on them". We were rarely asked to actually THINK. Definitely not the Math or Science teachers, but I do remember one or two History teachers who tried to make the subject more than memorization of a series of events by date.

By high school they started offering more "meaningful" subjects, one could take a class called "Language and Human Behavior" in lieu of a standard English class. But none of the more "meaningful" classes were offered in Science or Math, those remained in the "Memorize this, you'll be tested on it later" mode.

So speaking only for my school system, and only for classes that graduated in the late 1960s thru at least the mid-1970s, we weren't even taught how to write a comprehensible sentence, let alone have the ability for critical thought.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

Actually, I wasn't taught any real English grammar past 3rd grade. The rest of it I picked up from taking Latin and reading a bunch of Classic (mainly 17th through 19th century) books. The latter probably explains why I sometimes have a weird tendency to capitalize things randomly and have lots of parentheses and run-on sentences. I would have killed for a decent English Grammar class.

[sunnyskywalker]

I didn't get grammar until 8th grade (with more in the following years), and that was only because I transferred from a supposedly "good" public school to a private one (which was more luck than anything - some of the private schools in the area are just as shitty as the public ones, except at least the public ones don't make you take "Christian womanhood" classes). Even so, 10th grade was the only year we really had to buckle down and learn grammar, because we were assumed to already know the basics beforehand and to have gotten it all afterward. (This was a common pattern - in college, all our professors assumed we had all learned at least basic grammar and composition skills, but this was just not the case. I think the teachers of each year of school assumed we had learned it last year, and so most of them didn't bother to teach it.) I still got my most thorough understanding of the parts of speech etc. in Spanish and Latin classes, because not having years of models of how to speak and write in those languages to instinctively copy, I really had to know what I was doing to conjugate and decline everything properly.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Are you familiar with Richard Feynman's tales about teaching in Brazil? His students there were taught to recite the textbook, so if he asked a question that they could fit into something they remembered they'd recite the answer, but if he asked them the simplest application of the same information they had no idea what he was talking about. (IIRC they knew that a ray of light traveling through a flat transparent object would emerge from it displaced but parallel to its original trajectory but didn't realize how this applied to a window.) Is this how you would describe your high school science experience?

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

Is this how you would describe your high school science experience?

Pretty much. But add to that that I was a girl (girls weren't expected to excel in science), and that I was placed in Track 3 of a 4 track system, 1 being the highest and 4 the lowest...meaning I was placed in the "average" track, and therefore did not get the "advanced" teaching that students on Tracks 1 and 2 got.

My highschool science experience consisted of sophomore Biology -- required of all students. This class, at least for us Track 3s, was primarily book larnin'...we read chapters, looked at the pictures in the textbook, and then got tested on same. There was very little lab work, I remember dissecting worms and a frog, but most lab time was spent laughing at the boys who flicked the pointy things used to hold worms and frogs apart, up to stick into the ceiling tiles.

Most memorable portion of the class was the Sex Education segment...our school system was considered progressive for the era, to be teaching the subject, which it decided should be part of the Biology curriculum. It consisted of medical anatomy charts, old military films from WW2 with severe warnings about STDs....

And the dead babies in bottles.

Actually fetuses in various stages of gestation. In bottles. Floating in formaldehyde. Courtesy of Yale Medical School.

Our luck, Dead Baby day came on one of the hottest days of the year at the beginning of June. In a school with no air conditioning. Which resulted in each Biology class thru out the day having at least one student fainting, either from the sight/smell of Dead Babies, or the heat, or both.

I don't think they had a Dead Baby day again after that year.

My other science class was "Chem/Phys" in my senior year, because I needed one more science credit for college, and I decided I didn't want to spend a full year in either Chemistry or Physics. Again, it was mostly "Read this, look at this picture, you'll be tested on it." But the nature of both subjects DID require more lab work than we'd had in Biology. We were bored with the Physics lab work, there's just so much you can do with pulleys and inclines, especially when it's a case of being instructed just what to do, not a case of discovering things on your own.

The chemistry labs were more interesting, but again we were given worksheets to follow, basically cooking recipes. Nothing to encourage us to think outside of the box, as it were.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

What a tragic story! I can see a lot of Hermione in it though. She even has a dislike of classes in which there was more than one right answer.

On another note, that makes me a bit paranoid that I am that kind of learner (just regurgitates facts without being able to interpret or use them). Of course, I was a fine arts major... perhaps that will save me? ;-)

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

On another note, that makes me a bit paranoid that I am that kind of learner (just regurgitates facts without being able to interpret or use them).

If you were that sort of person, you wouldn't belong to a group like DeathToCapslock, at least you wouldn't be actively participating in discussions like you do, because all you'd be able to comprehend were facts and figures set in stone.

In hindsight I now see that this girl Sue was like that in school, but back then I thought someone who could come up with the correct answer almost immediately "proved" how "smart" they were. She could get A's in Calculus, but was thrown for a loop in Literature class if the class was discussing why Hamlet did what he did in Shakespeare's play...