Amy Shuffelton

Because the Harry Potter novels are set in Harry’s school, conversations with children about the books give insights into their thinking about teachers and school. Conversations with Serbian children about the books reveal a perspective on the ethical landscape of schools that is distinct from familiar scholarly perspectives on children’s ethics, particularly the ethics of fairness and caring. Serbian children judged teachers to be good if they were “strict but not too strict.” The “strict but not too strict” axis along which Serbian children aligned teachers is here explicated and compared to alternative ways of judging teachers good or bad. This article concludes that while the “strict but not too strict” standard has significant weaknesses, it deserves to be taken seriously as a conception of how imperfect human beings create relationships that promote human good, as well as a commentary on the role of the teacher.

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political.