Ministry supervisor Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter's Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom made the difference between School and Education crystal-gazing clear.

JK Rowling in Order of the Phoenix:

"This is School, Mr. Potter. Not the Real World," she said softly.

- "So we're not supposed to be prepared for what's waiting out there?"

- "There's nothing waiting out there . . .
who do you imagine wants to attack children like yourselves? If you are still worried, if someone is alarming you with fibs, I would like to hear about it. I am your friend. Now kindly continue your reading."

I had to blog this while the Stupid Girls debate is on, because I consider JK Rowling's cultural smarts to reach far beyond Stupid Girls and the Tyranny of Thin. Having read every Harry Potter book at least once, I'd argue that the Culture of Schooling is a specialty of Rowling's. I'd argue that Order of the Phoenix would make a first-class focus for modern citizenship education throughout all worlds muggle and magical, in any language.

Are we just a pretend world of fashionable thought, obsessed with trying to look and feel smart for each other, neglecting and perhaps unable to actually BE smart and DO smart?

Pink, Oprah and JK Rowling fighting "Thin is in" face stupidity both cultural and critical, a telescoping of intellect and imagination into a one-dimensional reflective surface, thinking selves starved for sustenance, belief and skepticism simultaneously out of whack in their daily diet of thought, causing chronic, clumsy, often crippling cultural malnourishment of epidemic proportions.

These all are problems that public education should be building cultures to combat, not to cement.

But in dispiriting fact, the standard-narrowed, uncertainty-fearing, control-freakish Culture of School works in the opposite direction from open science cultures that celebrate real smarts. If critical thinking is brain food, school is anorexia.

Time-wind back like Hermione to see when my alter ego MisEducation first played with this theme, riffing on three real world lessons:

1. What matters in life is learned outside the classroom.

2. Individuals are not interchangeable.

3. Life isn't fair, rules are made to be broken, and
there's nothing "magic" about numbers.

There's little left about the culture of school that fosters the scientific method of inquiry, so why would we fancy school a fit environment for real world-class science education --in fiction or fact? Are we too stupid to let go this fiction that Defense Against the Dark Arts, whatever that proves to be in our very real post-9-11 culture, is just textbook theory and not the real world?

At least in the Culture Kitchen, where we're literate, learned, believers all in free liberal public education as real Defense Against the Dark Arts, we're not Stupid Girls. Here we can be Smart Women inclined to critically consider public education models that don't even WANT to look old school, win an agency contract and pose for money -- such as the nonprofit online Public Library of Science.

PLoS is more public, more education, more current, more real culture of science than schooling can fake. It really is a free, open culture of intellectual inquiry where private minds like mine can learn, not society's public ministry compelling intellectual performance and preferring gloved-wand government controls to diversity and free thought.

Liza Gross in this PLoS feature brings the light and the heat.

Asked since 1985 whether "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals” we answer that our culture's confusion has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985, to 21% in 2005.

Because simple true–false questions exaggerate the strength of both positions, Miller also asked more nuanced questions in 1993 and 2003. Again, the proportion of adults holding tentative or uncertain positions increased . . .only 14% expressed unequivocal support for evolution -- a result Miller calls “shocking.”

Okay, that seems like a real world problem! Can our schools help defend against it?

Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School: “most people really haven't made up their mind about this issue and, in fact, really haven't even thought about it.” Rather than fretting about the cultural divide -- or worse, doing nothing -- Miller urges scientists to do their part to bridge the gap.

Miller has devoted his 30-year career to studying public understanding of science and technology and its implications for a healthy democracy. To possess what Miller calls civic scientific literacy, one must have the capacity to make sense of competing arguments in a scientific debate.

If public schooling were up to this real world challenge of sorting through and making sense of competing scientific arguments, wouldn't the public mind be getting less muddled, rather than measurably more so?

Seems to me real world schooling a la Dolores Umbridge is working against real education, to INCREASE public confusion and IMPAIR our ability to think critically, and that well-educated and objective folks who prize intellectual independence would be, upon reviewing the evidence, compelled by reason to agree that School is winning but Education is losing.

We don't need more attention to school problems to make school work better; it's clearly succeeding too well already, but at the wrong things! Maybe it's time to give up on school then, start to think critically about education solutions and the real world.

The Public Library of Science isn't tedious textbook theory for the standardized test. It is real world Defense Against the Dark Arts, and it's not just kid stuff but real education of, by and for the real public.

Girls and moms may not be able to perfect school through sheer force of will any more than we can perfect our bodies or biology that way, but fat or thin, we can simply choose to be the Education we want to see in the world.

We can learn and accept that if there comes a breaking point, when real world School is torn apart and forced by dark forces to close (like Hogwarts) then it's not really the end of the world, any more than closing real-world New Orleans schools was.

Fond as I am of Hogwarts and my own real world "alma maters" I've learned the many differences between school and education, and between school and real world nourishing mothers (another deliberate ministry confusion, it seems.)

The minds and the magic within are what's worth us sacrificing to study and support, to help save, not any outer shell exalting form over substance.

School or Stupid Girls, that's a fact.