Laurie Penny on the Rowlingverse:
"Ironic, then, that I actually did get to go to wizard school—or as close as you can get in the mundane world. I went, on a scholarship, to a local private school that had houses and weird uniforms and trained you to believe that you were special."
(urban: but Idris, didn't you, also, go to a fee-paying private school? NO, I FUCKING DIDN'T)
It's actually not bad, even if it's by Laurie of House Penny:
"The Harry Potter books are a childish rescue fantasy that feeds into a far more adult escapism: they are, after all, the ultimate fairytale of social mobility through merit. If you’re born with magical ability, you get to go to a special school where they’ll teach you special skills, and that’s okay, because you’ll be part of the good elite, who get to mess around catching pixies and playing wizard chess and protecting the powerless, and not the bad elite, who are like Nazis with better hair. In these stories, liberal meritocracy is set against the simpler evil of aristocracy—those wizards, including the Dark Lord himself, whose main bugbear throughout the series is the corruption of “pure” magical blood by Muggle-born witches and wizards. In a feat of worldbuilding that chimed perfectly with liberal triumphalism of the mid-nineties, it turns out that all magic is really good for—all Rowling’s Wizard government, the Ministry of Magic, exists to do—is to maintain the wizarding world as a secretive parasite universe, invisible to ordinary folk."
Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal - The Baffler