Would you send your child to Hogwarts?

Well, with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, this seems a topical question. It's also one which I'm guessing many Harry Potter readers will have asked themselves over the years. Your kids may love the idea of going (all that excitement, albeit with perhaps rather too much death and destruction), but I'm not convinced I'd send my children to Hogwarts (that's if they turned out to be talented muggles). Not only is it too dangerous, but what on earth would they learn there?!
In this essay by Steve Vander Ark, the consensus seems very much to be no, don't educate your children with Harry and co. After all, as he writes, the children really don't learn much, and the teachers do not treat their students well. He's right, isn't he? I don't recall much maths, foreign languages (although, of course they're no longer compulsory at secondary school in the real world either) or PHSE. Surely Hermione would love to read some English literature, whether a little bit of Forster (I think this would tickle her fancy) or something more challenging (the metaphysical poets?). Instead she's stuck with potion making, fighting off evil and learning magic. Hermione, Harry and friends also come up against so many truly terrible teachers (would Dolores Umbridge or Severus Snape be licensed to teach?)
English teacher and blogger extraordinaire Dana Huff has written a very detailed post on this very subject. In it she discusses the merits (or otherwise) of the main Hogwarts teachers, from Snape and McGonagall to Hagrid and Sybill Trelawney. Not many, other than Lupin (who makes the top five in my list of the most inspring teachers in films), and of course, Professor Dumbledore, are very inspiring. Mind you, Ms Huff is perhaps not as much of a fan of Dumbledore as others might be. She writes:
"We are never given an assessment of Dumbledore’s teaching skills, but based on his relationship with the students, he was probably fairly good. I do wonder at his skill in selecting some of his staff, but he seems, in all, to be a fairly good administrator. He is not always as supportive of his faculty as he could be, but often that’s because the faculty member in question is being unreasonable (Snape, most of the time)."
What do you think? Is Hogwarts an appealing educational establishment? Maybe I'd have a different view if I was currently at school, but for the moment at least, I'm glad that my daughter is learning to spell (beautifully and noisily are on her latest list) rather than learn spells....

SOURCE: TO