Education: Little Brother vs. Harry Potter

3 - In Little Brother, the themes involved with education are mostly negative. The novel portrays the education system as a subset of the state. In this case, it is an all-seeing, almost anti-democratic state in which the state's citizens' rights are severely limited through the use Panoptic-types of security. The citizens are expected to follow the narrowly constructed view of the norm and when they don't, they are punished. Similarly, in the fifth Harry Potter, the addition of the character Dolores Umbridge represents this same idea. She turns the education system that was once about thinking critically and success into a demoralizing, almost prison-like system in which the students are extrememly limited in what knowledge they have access to. Both examples from Little Brother and Harry Potter show the education system as an almost prison, where the students are restricted and taught that free-thought is highly discouraged and seen as a danger to the state.