McGonagall is a Bad Teacher: A Polemic
Warning: long and, as the title says, a polemic.
Introduction
If I look things up on the Harry Potter wiki and check out a few pictures of castles, suddenly my Pinterest suggestions are full of Harry Potter memes. Some are funny or interesting, but some are paeans to McGonagall as a wonderful teacher and human being. I’m not about to hunt down random strangers to tell them they’re being wrong on the internet, but no. Just no.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that the character should have been written differently or that it’s wrong to find her interesting. I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t like her for any of the subjective reasons we like real people. I’m only arguing that the text does not support the idea that McGonagall is mature, fair, supportive, or an overall good teacher and authority figure.
I don’t think she’s intentionally malicious or destructive. But if you leave her intentions aside and look at the effects she has on the students and other teachers, McGonagall is terrible.
Part I: Deputy Headmurderess
If I had to make my case based on only one of her failures, it’s this: McGonagall knowingly sets students up to die.
In PS/SS, she assigns eleven-year-olds detention at night in the Forbidden Forest when she knows something capable of killing unicorns-which has never happened in all the decades Hagrid has been at Hogwarts-is on the loose. They know zero defensive spells. Hagrid has to check whether they can even send up sparks to call for help. Fang couldn’t protect them even if he weren’t a coward, and Hagrid has limited means to protect them even if he didn’t split the party. They probably have no chance of running away, given that the creature (if it is a creature) must be faster than a unicorn, which is itself faster than a werewolf.
Furthermore, McGonagall knows they’re using the philosopher’s stone as bait to lure a dangerous, immortality-obsessed wizard into the school. Which means she knows that said dangerous wizard might have killed the unicorns for their known life-saving properties. And that she’s sending the students to potentially meet someone cruel and dangerous to kill unicorns over the corpse of one of those unicorns. What does she think will happen? What would have happened if Firenze hadn’t leapt into the clearing at exactly the moment Quirrellmort looked up and saw Harry?
And for what offenses does she think “possible horrible death” is warranted? For Harry and Hermione, it’s either concocting an elaborate ruse about an imaginary dragon to lure Draco “out of bed and into trouble” (what she claims) or dragon-smuggling (what she may suspect). For Draco, it’s lying about being out of bed to look for a dragon-a position she doesn’t reverse even after Filch catches Harry and Hermione and she realizes Draco sincerely believes in the dragon. And surely he mentioned, somewhere between their starting point and Snape’s quarters, that he’d seen it with his own eyes. What reason did she give for disbelieving Draco after that? And why punish him anyway?
Maybe the same reason she says she’s punishing Neville: for being out of bed. “Mr. Longbottom, nothing gives you the right to walk around school at night, especially these days, it’s very dangerous.” So…to keep them from wandering around inside the school at night, where it’s very dangerous, she sends them out into the Forbidden Forest at night, where it’s even more dangerous and also much farther from help than any place in the castle. Maybe she thinks that if they survive, they’ll be too frightened to wander about again…but no part of a sentence describing a school detention should include the phrase “if they survive.”
Also, we should circle back around to the point that she collaborated in a plan to lure an immortality-seeking bank robber who might also be violent into the school.
But say you cut her some slack because Dumbledore may have influenced the detention (to give Harry a chance to confront Voldemort) and definitely spearheaded the entrapment plot. Let’s jump ahead to PoA, when she sets Neville up to die yet again, this time all on her own.
After she demands to know which “abysmally foolish person” wrote down the passwords and lost them, and Neville is the only person brave enough to confess, here’s the result:
“Professor McGonagall was so furious with him that she had banned him from all future Hogsmeade visits, given him a detention and forbidden anyone to give him the password into the Tower. Poor Neville was forced to wait outside the common room every night for somebody to let him in, while the security trolls leered unpleasantly at him. None of these punishments, however…”
To be clear, these are punishments, not security measures. If she cared about security, she could have done literally anything but set Neville up as an obstacle in front of the portrait hole Sirius Black has already tried or succeeded in entering twice. Sirius Black, the man she believes to be a mass-murderer with no compunction about killing innocent bystanders. Who nearly (she thinks) murdered a student in his bed yesterday. If Sirius were the person McGonagall believed, and he tried to break in a third time, Neville would have died.
McGonagall sets Neville up to be murdered. Because she’s “furious.” I hope it’s uncontroversial to say that a teacher who deliberately puts a student in the path of a murderer because she’s angry is not a mature or responsible teacher.
But suppose you discount those as outliers. What does McGonagall accept as normal, appropriate punishment?
She was almost certainly teaching when Arthur was punished for being out after curfew in a way which left him literally scarred for life. (Possibly with those whips and chains Filch gets misty-eyed about.) Arthur was caught by the caretaker-who, in Harry’s day, can only suggest punishments, not assign them. If McGonagall was already Head of House Gryffindor, she probably assigned that brutal punishment. She may even have administered it.
Hogwarts doesn’t allow that now, and we never hear McGonagall pining for the days when she could whip miscreants. She seems to accept that detentions and speaking to a student’s Head of House are more appropriate, as she tells “Moody” when she comes across him slamming Ferret-Draco against the stone floor.
Except…she doesn’t say anything about his slamming Draco against the floor so hard that he was “squealing in pain.” What McGonagall says (“weakly”) is, “Moody, we never use Transfiguration as punishment! […] Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?” Now, Transfiguring students does seem wrong, but would it have been any better if Moody had slammed Draco against the floor repeatedly in human form? But McGonagall doesn’t mention that brutally physically assaulting students is also not okay.
Even with Transfiguration in the mix, she isn’t shocked enough to insist that she will take Draco to his Head of House, not Moody, who might do any number of things to Draco between the Entrance Hall and Snape’s office. No, she watches while Moody makes a barely-veiled threat for Draco to pass on to his father, seizes Draco “by the upper arm” and marches him away, and does nothing but stare “anxiously after them for a few moments.” Dragging a student off by the arm probably doesn’t register with her as unacceptable (she herself dragged Draco off by the ear once). But the rest of it? She’s the Deputy Headmistress! She has the authority to intervene! Yet she doesn’t.
And we never hear her say, “I should have known that first day that there was something wrong!” or, “Albus, I told you he couldn’t be trusted after the way he assaulted Mr. Malfoy!” Maybe she did, when Harry wasn’t in the room. But maybe she genuinely thought that the real Moody would act that way, and that it wasn’t reason to worry. That it was one of those understandable mistakes a new teacher might make. Perhaps something they were all tempted to do on occasion. The fact that he turned out to be a murderous Death Eater astonished her-how could anyone have guessed?
But suppose we decide to ignore all of this as not relevant to her classroom behavior. Maybe she fails dismally at protecting students, but is good at teaching and guiding them day-to-day?
Well. What is her class, exactly?
Many of her lessons involve animals: beetles into buttons, mice into snuffboxes, guinea fowl into guinea pigs, rabbits into slippers, hedgehogs into pincushions, possibly owls into opera glasses (Hermione reads about this one), and Vanishing snails, mice, and kittens. We don’t get a lot of detail about these lessons. But during hedgehogs-to-pincushions, McGonagall says, “I might remind you that your pincushion, Thomas, still curls up in fright if anyone approaches it with a pin!”
Um. Are these real animals? Which they are turning into inanimate objects, usually with only partial success? And sticking with pins? And making disappear, again usually with only partial success? Even if they aren’t real, Dean’s hedgehog is good enough at simulating being real to appear frightened of a pin-presumably in response to previous attempts to stick him with it. (Remember the Good Place episode “Trolley Problem”? “They’re not real! But their pain is.”) Also, I don’t think we ever see anyone un-Vanish anything. Hermione doesn’t apologize for not knowing how to un-Vanish Harry’s potion after she cleans up too soon in that one class. Maybe you can’t un-Vanish things. If so, then McGonagall’s class is officially Kitten-Killing Class.
What is this class like for kids who feel upset at seeing animals hurt, let alone being ordered to hurt them? What is the bunny-to-slippers lesson like for bunny-lover Lavender Brown?
Day after day, the students are practicing hurting animals and ignoring their fear and pain. If Tom Riddle killing another kid’s pet is a bad sign (and I fully agree that it is), what is seven years of methodically, progressively hardening kids to inflicting violence on animals? We might get a hint in OotP when, in the “Vanishing mice” lesson, McGonagall says, “Dean Thomas, if you do that to the mouse again I shall put you in detention.” I hope whatever Dean did wasn’t frightening for or painful to the mouse, just disruptive to the class, but we don’t know. And what effect does this curriculum have on how the kids perceive human suffering?
So, even if McGonagall is otherwise kind and supportive in class, there are serious problems with the way she’s teaching. “Excels at killing kittens” shouldn’t be on student evaluations.
Part II: Rather Sharp (and Unfair)
But whether she is kind or supportive is debatable at best.
Ron went an entire year with an obviously-taped-together malfunctioning wand-which McGonagall couldn’t have failed to notice given that her class requires a lot of wand use-and she didn’t lift a finger to help. She bought an absurdly expensive broom for Harry, but couldn’t figure out a way to get Ron a functioning wand? When we know there’s a fund for students with financial hardships? But then, the broom benefitted McGonagall, who wants her House team to win. She must care about Quidditch more than Ron’s education. Or the safety of every student in her class, for that matter.
A lot of her dialog involves snapping at students or disparaging their worth and intelligence. Even if we’re catching her at bad moments, she seems to have an awful lot of them.
Take her rant after Harry, Hermione, and Neville are caught out of bed: “I’m disgusted […] Four students out of bed in one night! I’ve never heard of such a thing before! […] Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Potter. […] I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” (PS/SS Chapter 15, “The Forbidden Forest”)
Even in this book, we might question whether this is really the most shameful behavior she’s ever seen from Gryffindor students. It seems flatly impossible once we learn what the Marauders got up to. (She assigned them all those detentions for hexing anyone who annoyed them, including an “illegal” hex, and didn’t find this worse than sneaking out of bed? She didn’t know they sneaked out of bed? Really?) So, she’s furious and taking it out on the students with hyperbolic venting.
Or suppose a student wants to talk to the headmaster privately? Surely there might be good reasons for that. But not in McGonagall’s book:
“‘See Professor Dumbledore?’ Professor McGonagall repeated, as though this was a very fishy thing to want to do. ‘Why?’
When Harry won’t tell her the reason,
“he wished at once he hadn’t, because Professor McGonagall’s nostrils flared. ‘Professor Dumbledore left ten minutes ago,’ she said coldly. […] Professor Dumbledore is a very great wizard, Potter, he has many demands on his time […] Something you have to say is more important than the Ministry of Magic, Potter?’” (PS/SS Chapter 16, “Through the Trapdoor”)
There are ways to explain to students that the headmaster isn’t available which don’t involve taking offense and belittling their unknown concerns. What if they’ve discovered something private and personally relevant to Dumbledore but not her? But McGonagall doesn’t see any possible reason they might not be able to talk to her, and lets them know with prejudice.
What about more day-to-day things? Take a few examples:
“’Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can’t even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!’” Professor McGonagall barked…” (GoF Chapter 15, “Beauxbatons and Durmstrang”)
“‘I suggest you all smarten yourselves up as much as you can while we are waiting.’ Her eyes lingered for a moment on Neville’s cloak, which was fastened under his left ear, and on Ron’s smudged nose. Harry nervously tried to flatten his hair.” (PS/SS Chapter 7, “The Sorting Hat”)
(Harry’s response suggests he’s sensing Aunt Petunia-style disdain.)
“’Weasley, straighten your hat,’ Professor McGonagall snapped at Ron. ‘Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.’” (GoF Chapter 15, “Beauxbatons and Durmstrang”)
“Miss Johnson, how dare you make such a racket in the Great Hall! Five points from Gryffindor!” (OotP Chapter 15, “The Hogwarts High Inquisitor”)
It would be nice to think that these are exceptions to her normal behavior which Harry only notices because they’re unusual, but he doesn’t seem at all surprised. In fact, it fits his first impressions of her.
“She had a very stern face and Harry’s first thought was that this was not someone to cross.” (PS/SS Chapter 7, “The Sorting Hat”)
“Harry had been quite right to think she wasn’t a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave them a talking-to the moment they had sat down in her first class.” (PS/SS Chapter 8, “The Potions Master”)
Her “talking-to” doesn’t sound that bad, but we can’t hear her tone, and what’s important is Harry’s impression: you don’t want to get on her bad side, because you’ll regret it.
We also have her own testimony that she was routinely harsh to at least one student: Peter Pettigrew. Why? He was “‘Never quite in [the “exceptionally bright” Black and Potter’s] league, talent-wise. I was often rather sharp with him.’” (PoA, “The Marauder’s Map”)
His less-than-brilliant performance is the only reason she gives for being “sharp” with Peter. If he wasn’t “quite” as talented as his “exceptionally bright” friends, he was…average? Perhaps even a little above average? And she was sharp with him for being only moderately bright so often that she remembers and regrets it fifteen years later? How does she treat Crabbe and Goyle in class, then? We never see her teach them, but I don’t see grounds for optimism.
Especially not given how she treats Neville. She doesn’t just set him up to be murdered by Sirius; she ensures that his Housemates will see his punishment every day, for maximum humiliation. Then in HBP she tells him all he lacks is confidence. As if she hasn’t been helping tear down his confidence down for the past five years!
We also see her so angry that her nostrils flare and so forth frequently enough that it seems like she has a short fuse in general. So all the times we see her snapping and snarling are probably reasonably representative of her usual behavior.
Harry does think at one point that she’s fairer than Snape. But we can’t be sure that she’s any fairer to Slytherin students she dislikes in class than Snape is to Harry, because we never see her teach the Slytherins. We do know that she refused to believe Draco’s testimony about Hagrid’s dragon despite strong circumstantial evidence in his favor.
And then there’s that rule against first-years having brooms. While I’ve heard explanations for why Harry was just so exceptionally talented or morally deserving that his exception was justified, those aren’t the reasons McGonagall gives. Here’s what she says:
“I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore and see if we can’t bend the first-year rule. Heaven knows, we need a better team than last year. Flattened in that last match by Slytherin. I couldn’t look Severus Snape in the face for weeks…”
So, according to McGonagall, the reason for “bending” the rule is so that her team can win and she can be insufferable about it to her junior colleague instead of the other way around.
Just in case we aren’t sure, she follows this up with, “I want to hear you’re training hard, Potter, or I may change my mind about punishing you.” (PS/SS Chapter 9, “The Midnight Duel”)
There’s nothing stopping her from telling Harry that she is taking five points from Gryffindor because he disobeyed the instruction to stay on the ground, but he is also allowed to get a broom and he’d better practice hard or he’ll have that privilege revoked. It’s McGonagall’s choice to tell him he’s getting special treatment instead of punishment, in exchange for helping the team win games so she can “look Severus Snape in the face.” It’s not about what Harry needs or deserves; it’s about what Harry can do for her.
She is also happy to sacrifice students’ academic development to her desire for bragging rights:
“Harry realized how much Professor McGonagall cared about beating Slytherin when she abstained from giving them homework in the week leading up to the match. […] ‘I’ve become accustomed to seeing the Quidditch Cup in my study, boys, and I really don’t want to have to hand it over to Professor Snape, so use the extra time to practice, won’t you?’ Snape was no less obviously partisan…” (OotP, “The Lion and the Serpent”)
Do they need to study for the extremely important test that determines which careers they’re allowed to pursue? Who cares, she wants that trophy so she can rub her victory in Snape’s face! (And if their performance isn’t affected by skipping this homework, what good is it the rest of the time? Looking good? Keeping them busy?) I’d rather assume that she didn’t give homework to any of her fifth-year classes, but Harry doesn’t say that. She may have let only Gryffindors off the hook. He does, after all, describe this action as “partisan.”
How often does she cut her Gryffindors breaks when there’s a big game coming up? And one wonders whether she sometimes let James win Quidditch games for her instead of punishing him. And the Twins. And any number of other bullies.
Part III: Command Responsibility
This is all bad enough for a rank-and-file teacher, but McGonagall is also the Deputy Headmistress. She is responsible for noticing problems with other teachers and informing Dumbledore so that he can take action. As the highest-ranking teacher in school, she also sets the bar for acceptable teacher behavior.
And we see the effects of her example. Pretty much every charge I’ve levelled at McGonagall-animal cruelty, verbal cruelty, favoritism, venting at students-has been levelled first, and more loudly, at Snape. Well, who taught him? Who was his example of how to control a class when he started teaching? Who probably hears students muttering about him and does nothing? The Deputy Headmistress, that’s who.
Harry compares the two of them on more than one occasion, just so we’re clear that we ought to be spotting similarities. Let’s take a closer look.
Most of the animals in Snape’s class are already dead. We don’t know whether they were humanely raised and killed or not. He psychologically torments Neville with the possibility that Neville’s own potion will kill his pet, and Trevor has a few seconds of gasping terror when he’s momentarily transformed into a tadpole. It’s hard to say whether there’s less total animal cruelty involved (given the animal-based potions ingredients), but at least students aren’t being asked to torture live animals weekly.
McGonagall may be less verbally cruel than Snape-but it’s also possible that she’s not, given how little we see of her in the classroom (and never with the Slytherins). We can’t be sure. But based on what we do see, maybe a lot of students would say, “I see no difference.”
Well, there is a little difference. McGonagall says Snape is far more lenient with Harry over the Sectumsempra attack than she would have been. And Snape doesn’t set students up to be murdered unless Dumbledore orders him to, whereas McGonagall has done so on her own initiative at least once and voluntarily at least three times (since we have no evidence that she objected to Dumbledore’s entrapment scheme in PS/SS or that he suggested the Forest detention, much less coerced her into assigning it). Perhaps rather than McGonagall Junior, Snape is McGonagall Lite. Now with 33% less risk of death!
Do the other teachers follow McGonagall’s shining example?
Flitwick uses a student’s pet for a classroom demonstration (zooming Trevor around the room-we can’t ask Trevor how this compared to a few seconds as a tadpole, but I expect he’d say both were terrible and neither should have happened), show obvious favoritism by falling down from excitement when a famous student arrives in class and by cheerfully supporting the decision to exempt that student from the first-year broom ban, and publicly humiliate a student when he assigns Seamus those lines comparing himself to a baboon as punishment for unsuccessful spellcasting.
The examples of Slughorn’s blatant favoritism would be a long list, so let’s just pause to note one: at his Hogwarts Express gathering, he pointedly and publicly humiliates Marcus Belby by denying him food as soon as Belby lets on that he isn’t close to his famous uncle. Okay, two: imagine all the kids through the decades who knew their teacher wouldn’t take the time to help them, or even learn their names, because they weren’t “connected,” while helping students of equal talent (or lack thereof) gain even more useful connections than they started with.
Trelawney tells Hermione, “I don’t remember ever meeting a student whose mind was so hopelessly Mundane.” Besides being rude, “Mundane” sounds like a dog-whistle for “Muggle.” Hagrid threatens to repeat “Moody’s”s trick of turning Draco into a ferret-which readers ought to take even more seriously than Draco, given that we know Hagrid has already tried to Transfigure one child (Dudley) into an animal to punish the child’s father for insulting Dumbledore. And six staff members collaborated in Dumbledore’s plot to lure a dangerous wizard into the school.
Animal cruelty, favoritism, publicly insulting students, putting students in danger or outright physically harming them-check, check, check, and check.
I could probably find more examples, but I think this is enough to show that these behaviors are entirely acceptable for Hogwarts teachers. Some take advantage more than others, but “not the worst” is not the same as “good” or even “okay.” And again, McGonagall is the Deputy Headmistress as well as a teacher. She sets the bar for what’s acceptable. She’s partly responsible for how her subordinates behave.
Conclusion
Dumbledore as Headmaster is also partly responsible, of course. And given the extreme reactions McGonagall has to anyone questioning him, we might wonder whether he’s more her cult leader than her boss and has warped her judgement. I can think of a number of other factors explaining and even mitigating her behavior: her culture, how she was taught, the crushing workload, etc. She may be fairer and less harsh than her own teachers, as Snape is less harsh (with regard to student safety) than McGonagall. Her relative acceptance of ending corporal punishment suggests that she might deserve some credit for trying to do better.
But that doesn’t help the students who suffer regular insults and humiliation and distress over animal suffering, or become progressively hardened to inflicting animal suffering, or are nearly murdered because of her. McGonagall is unfair, immature, irresponsible, and cruel. She is partly responsible for other teachers’ bad behavior.
She is the worst.
Introduction
If I look things up on the Harry Potter wiki and check out a few pictures of castles, suddenly my Pinterest suggestions are full of Harry Potter memes. Some are funny or interesting, but some are paeans to McGonagall as a wonderful teacher and human being. I’m not about to hunt down random strangers to tell them they’re being wrong on the internet, but no. Just no.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that the character should have been written differently or that it’s wrong to find her interesting. I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t like her for any of the subjective reasons we like real people. I’m only arguing that the text does not support the idea that McGonagall is mature, fair, supportive, or an overall good teacher and authority figure.
I don’t think she’s intentionally malicious or destructive. But if you leave her intentions aside and look at the effects she has on the students and other teachers, McGonagall is terrible.
Part I: Deputy Headmurderess
If I had to make my case based on only one of her failures, it’s this: McGonagall knowingly sets students up to die.
In PS/SS, she assigns eleven-year-olds detention at night in the Forbidden Forest when she knows something capable of killing unicorns-which has never happened in all the decades Hagrid has been at Hogwarts-is on the loose. They know zero defensive spells. Hagrid has to check whether they can even send up sparks to call for help. Fang couldn’t protect them even if he weren’t a coward, and Hagrid has limited means to protect them even if he didn’t split the party. They probably have no chance of running away, given that the creature (if it is a creature) must be faster than a unicorn, which is itself faster than a werewolf.
Furthermore, McGonagall knows they’re using the philosopher’s stone as bait to lure a dangerous, immortality-obsessed wizard into the school. Which means she knows that said dangerous wizard might have killed the unicorns for their known life-saving properties. And that she’s sending the students to potentially meet someone cruel and dangerous to kill unicorns over the corpse of one of those unicorns. What does she think will happen? What would have happened if Firenze hadn’t leapt into the clearing at exactly the moment Quirrellmort looked up and saw Harry?
And for what offenses does she think “possible horrible death” is warranted? For Harry and Hermione, it’s either concocting an elaborate ruse about an imaginary dragon to lure Draco “out of bed and into trouble” (what she claims) or dragon-smuggling (what she may suspect). For Draco, it’s lying about being out of bed to look for a dragon-a position she doesn’t reverse even after Filch catches Harry and Hermione and she realizes Draco sincerely believes in the dragon. And surely he mentioned, somewhere between their starting point and Snape’s quarters, that he’d seen it with his own eyes. What reason did she give for disbelieving Draco after that? And why punish him anyway?
Maybe the same reason she says she’s punishing Neville: for being out of bed. “Mr. Longbottom, nothing gives you the right to walk around school at night, especially these days, it’s very dangerous.” So…to keep them from wandering around inside the school at night, where it’s very dangerous, she sends them out into the Forbidden Forest at night, where it’s even more dangerous and also much farther from help than any place in the castle. Maybe she thinks that if they survive, they’ll be too frightened to wander about again…but no part of a sentence describing a school detention should include the phrase “if they survive.”
Also, we should circle back around to the point that she collaborated in a plan to lure an immortality-seeking bank robber who might also be violent into the school.
But say you cut her some slack because Dumbledore may have influenced the detention (to give Harry a chance to confront Voldemort) and definitely spearheaded the entrapment plot. Let’s jump ahead to PoA, when she sets Neville up to die yet again, this time all on her own.
After she demands to know which “abysmally foolish person” wrote down the passwords and lost them, and Neville is the only person brave enough to confess, here’s the result:
“Professor McGonagall was so furious with him that she had banned him from all future Hogsmeade visits, given him a detention and forbidden anyone to give him the password into the Tower. Poor Neville was forced to wait outside the common room every night for somebody to let him in, while the security trolls leered unpleasantly at him. None of these punishments, however…”
To be clear, these are punishments, not security measures. If she cared about security, she could have done literally anything but set Neville up as an obstacle in front of the portrait hole Sirius Black has already tried or succeeded in entering twice. Sirius Black, the man she believes to be a mass-murderer with no compunction about killing innocent bystanders. Who nearly (she thinks) murdered a student in his bed yesterday. If Sirius were the person McGonagall believed, and he tried to break in a third time, Neville would have died.
McGonagall sets Neville up to be murdered. Because she’s “furious.” I hope it’s uncontroversial to say that a teacher who deliberately puts a student in the path of a murderer because she’s angry is not a mature or responsible teacher.
But suppose you discount those as outliers. What does McGonagall accept as normal, appropriate punishment?
She was almost certainly teaching when Arthur was punished for being out after curfew in a way which left him literally scarred for life. (Possibly with those whips and chains Filch gets misty-eyed about.) Arthur was caught by the caretaker-who, in Harry’s day, can only suggest punishments, not assign them. If McGonagall was already Head of House Gryffindor, she probably assigned that brutal punishment. She may even have administered it.
Hogwarts doesn’t allow that now, and we never hear McGonagall pining for the days when she could whip miscreants. She seems to accept that detentions and speaking to a student’s Head of House are more appropriate, as she tells “Moody” when she comes across him slamming Ferret-Draco against the stone floor.
Except…she doesn’t say anything about his slamming Draco against the floor so hard that he was “squealing in pain.” What McGonagall says (“weakly”) is, “Moody, we never use Transfiguration as punishment! […] Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?” Now, Transfiguring students does seem wrong, but would it have been any better if Moody had slammed Draco against the floor repeatedly in human form? But McGonagall doesn’t mention that brutally physically assaulting students is also not okay.
Even with Transfiguration in the mix, she isn’t shocked enough to insist that she will take Draco to his Head of House, not Moody, who might do any number of things to Draco between the Entrance Hall and Snape’s office. No, she watches while Moody makes a barely-veiled threat for Draco to pass on to his father, seizes Draco “by the upper arm” and marches him away, and does nothing but stare “anxiously after them for a few moments.” Dragging a student off by the arm probably doesn’t register with her as unacceptable (she herself dragged Draco off by the ear once). But the rest of it? She’s the Deputy Headmistress! She has the authority to intervene! Yet she doesn’t.
And we never hear her say, “I should have known that first day that there was something wrong!” or, “Albus, I told you he couldn’t be trusted after the way he assaulted Mr. Malfoy!” Maybe she did, when Harry wasn’t in the room. But maybe she genuinely thought that the real Moody would act that way, and that it wasn’t reason to worry. That it was one of those understandable mistakes a new teacher might make. Perhaps something they were all tempted to do on occasion. The fact that he turned out to be a murderous Death Eater astonished her-how could anyone have guessed?
But suppose we decide to ignore all of this as not relevant to her classroom behavior. Maybe she fails dismally at protecting students, but is good at teaching and guiding them day-to-day?
Well. What is her class, exactly?
Many of her lessons involve animals: beetles into buttons, mice into snuffboxes, guinea fowl into guinea pigs, rabbits into slippers, hedgehogs into pincushions, possibly owls into opera glasses (Hermione reads about this one), and Vanishing snails, mice, and kittens. We don’t get a lot of detail about these lessons. But during hedgehogs-to-pincushions, McGonagall says, “I might remind you that your pincushion, Thomas, still curls up in fright if anyone approaches it with a pin!”
Um. Are these real animals? Which they are turning into inanimate objects, usually with only partial success? And sticking with pins? And making disappear, again usually with only partial success? Even if they aren’t real, Dean’s hedgehog is good enough at simulating being real to appear frightened of a pin-presumably in response to previous attempts to stick him with it. (Remember the Good Place episode “Trolley Problem”? “They’re not real! But their pain is.”) Also, I don’t think we ever see anyone un-Vanish anything. Hermione doesn’t apologize for not knowing how to un-Vanish Harry’s potion after she cleans up too soon in that one class. Maybe you can’t un-Vanish things. If so, then McGonagall’s class is officially Kitten-Killing Class.
What is this class like for kids who feel upset at seeing animals hurt, let alone being ordered to hurt them? What is the bunny-to-slippers lesson like for bunny-lover Lavender Brown?
Day after day, the students are practicing hurting animals and ignoring their fear and pain. If Tom Riddle killing another kid’s pet is a bad sign (and I fully agree that it is), what is seven years of methodically, progressively hardening kids to inflicting violence on animals? We might get a hint in OotP when, in the “Vanishing mice” lesson, McGonagall says, “Dean Thomas, if you do that to the mouse again I shall put you in detention.” I hope whatever Dean did wasn’t frightening for or painful to the mouse, just disruptive to the class, but we don’t know. And what effect does this curriculum have on how the kids perceive human suffering?
So, even if McGonagall is otherwise kind and supportive in class, there are serious problems with the way she’s teaching. “Excels at killing kittens” shouldn’t be on student evaluations.
Part II: Rather Sharp (and Unfair)
But whether she is kind or supportive is debatable at best.
Ron went an entire year with an obviously-taped-together malfunctioning wand-which McGonagall couldn’t have failed to notice given that her class requires a lot of wand use-and she didn’t lift a finger to help. She bought an absurdly expensive broom for Harry, but couldn’t figure out a way to get Ron a functioning wand? When we know there’s a fund for students with financial hardships? But then, the broom benefitted McGonagall, who wants her House team to win. She must care about Quidditch more than Ron’s education. Or the safety of every student in her class, for that matter.
A lot of her dialog involves snapping at students or disparaging their worth and intelligence. Even if we’re catching her at bad moments, she seems to have an awful lot of them.
Take her rant after Harry, Hermione, and Neville are caught out of bed: “I’m disgusted […] Four students out of bed in one night! I’ve never heard of such a thing before! […] Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Potter. […] I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” (PS/SS Chapter 15, “The Forbidden Forest”)
Even in this book, we might question whether this is really the most shameful behavior she’s ever seen from Gryffindor students. It seems flatly impossible once we learn what the Marauders got up to. (She assigned them all those detentions for hexing anyone who annoyed them, including an “illegal” hex, and didn’t find this worse than sneaking out of bed? She didn’t know they sneaked out of bed? Really?) So, she’s furious and taking it out on the students with hyperbolic venting.
Or suppose a student wants to talk to the headmaster privately? Surely there might be good reasons for that. But not in McGonagall’s book:
“‘See Professor Dumbledore?’ Professor McGonagall repeated, as though this was a very fishy thing to want to do. ‘Why?’
When Harry won’t tell her the reason,
“he wished at once he hadn’t, because Professor McGonagall’s nostrils flared. ‘Professor Dumbledore left ten minutes ago,’ she said coldly. […] Professor Dumbledore is a very great wizard, Potter, he has many demands on his time […] Something you have to say is more important than the Ministry of Magic, Potter?’” (PS/SS Chapter 16, “Through the Trapdoor”)
There are ways to explain to students that the headmaster isn’t available which don’t involve taking offense and belittling their unknown concerns. What if they’ve discovered something private and personally relevant to Dumbledore but not her? But McGonagall doesn’t see any possible reason they might not be able to talk to her, and lets them know with prejudice.
What about more day-to-day things? Take a few examples:
“’Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can’t even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!’” Professor McGonagall barked…” (GoF Chapter 15, “Beauxbatons and Durmstrang”)
“‘I suggest you all smarten yourselves up as much as you can while we are waiting.’ Her eyes lingered for a moment on Neville’s cloak, which was fastened under his left ear, and on Ron’s smudged nose. Harry nervously tried to flatten his hair.” (PS/SS Chapter 7, “The Sorting Hat”)
(Harry’s response suggests he’s sensing Aunt Petunia-style disdain.)
“’Weasley, straighten your hat,’ Professor McGonagall snapped at Ron. ‘Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.’” (GoF Chapter 15, “Beauxbatons and Durmstrang”)
“Miss Johnson, how dare you make such a racket in the Great Hall! Five points from Gryffindor!” (OotP Chapter 15, “The Hogwarts High Inquisitor”)
It would be nice to think that these are exceptions to her normal behavior which Harry only notices because they’re unusual, but he doesn’t seem at all surprised. In fact, it fits his first impressions of her.
“She had a very stern face and Harry’s first thought was that this was not someone to cross.” (PS/SS Chapter 7, “The Sorting Hat”)
“Harry had been quite right to think she wasn’t a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave them a talking-to the moment they had sat down in her first class.” (PS/SS Chapter 8, “The Potions Master”)
Her “talking-to” doesn’t sound that bad, but we can’t hear her tone, and what’s important is Harry’s impression: you don’t want to get on her bad side, because you’ll regret it.
We also have her own testimony that she was routinely harsh to at least one student: Peter Pettigrew. Why? He was “‘Never quite in [the “exceptionally bright” Black and Potter’s] league, talent-wise. I was often rather sharp with him.’” (PoA, “The Marauder’s Map”)
His less-than-brilliant performance is the only reason she gives for being “sharp” with Peter. If he wasn’t “quite” as talented as his “exceptionally bright” friends, he was…average? Perhaps even a little above average? And she was sharp with him for being only moderately bright so often that she remembers and regrets it fifteen years later? How does she treat Crabbe and Goyle in class, then? We never see her teach them, but I don’t see grounds for optimism.
Especially not given how she treats Neville. She doesn’t just set him up to be murdered by Sirius; she ensures that his Housemates will see his punishment every day, for maximum humiliation. Then in HBP she tells him all he lacks is confidence. As if she hasn’t been helping tear down his confidence down for the past five years!
We also see her so angry that her nostrils flare and so forth frequently enough that it seems like she has a short fuse in general. So all the times we see her snapping and snarling are probably reasonably representative of her usual behavior.
Harry does think at one point that she’s fairer than Snape. But we can’t be sure that she’s any fairer to Slytherin students she dislikes in class than Snape is to Harry, because we never see her teach the Slytherins. We do know that she refused to believe Draco’s testimony about Hagrid’s dragon despite strong circumstantial evidence in his favor.
And then there’s that rule against first-years having brooms. While I’ve heard explanations for why Harry was just so exceptionally talented or morally deserving that his exception was justified, those aren’t the reasons McGonagall gives. Here’s what she says:
“I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore and see if we can’t bend the first-year rule. Heaven knows, we need a better team than last year. Flattened in that last match by Slytherin. I couldn’t look Severus Snape in the face for weeks…”
So, according to McGonagall, the reason for “bending” the rule is so that her team can win and she can be insufferable about it to her junior colleague instead of the other way around.
Just in case we aren’t sure, she follows this up with, “I want to hear you’re training hard, Potter, or I may change my mind about punishing you.” (PS/SS Chapter 9, “The Midnight Duel”)
There’s nothing stopping her from telling Harry that she is taking five points from Gryffindor because he disobeyed the instruction to stay on the ground, but he is also allowed to get a broom and he’d better practice hard or he’ll have that privilege revoked. It’s McGonagall’s choice to tell him he’s getting special treatment instead of punishment, in exchange for helping the team win games so she can “look Severus Snape in the face.” It’s not about what Harry needs or deserves; it’s about what Harry can do for her.
She is also happy to sacrifice students’ academic development to her desire for bragging rights:
“Harry realized how much Professor McGonagall cared about beating Slytherin when she abstained from giving them homework in the week leading up to the match. […] ‘I’ve become accustomed to seeing the Quidditch Cup in my study, boys, and I really don’t want to have to hand it over to Professor Snape, so use the extra time to practice, won’t you?’ Snape was no less obviously partisan…” (OotP, “The Lion and the Serpent”)
Do they need to study for the extremely important test that determines which careers they’re allowed to pursue? Who cares, she wants that trophy so she can rub her victory in Snape’s face! (And if their performance isn’t affected by skipping this homework, what good is it the rest of the time? Looking good? Keeping them busy?) I’d rather assume that she didn’t give homework to any of her fifth-year classes, but Harry doesn’t say that. She may have let only Gryffindors off the hook. He does, after all, describe this action as “partisan.”
How often does she cut her Gryffindors breaks when there’s a big game coming up? And one wonders whether she sometimes let James win Quidditch games for her instead of punishing him. And the Twins. And any number of other bullies.
Part III: Command Responsibility
This is all bad enough for a rank-and-file teacher, but McGonagall is also the Deputy Headmistress. She is responsible for noticing problems with other teachers and informing Dumbledore so that he can take action. As the highest-ranking teacher in school, she also sets the bar for acceptable teacher behavior.
And we see the effects of her example. Pretty much every charge I’ve levelled at McGonagall-animal cruelty, verbal cruelty, favoritism, venting at students-has been levelled first, and more loudly, at Snape. Well, who taught him? Who was his example of how to control a class when he started teaching? Who probably hears students muttering about him and does nothing? The Deputy Headmistress, that’s who.
Harry compares the two of them on more than one occasion, just so we’re clear that we ought to be spotting similarities. Let’s take a closer look.
Most of the animals in Snape’s class are already dead. We don’t know whether they were humanely raised and killed or not. He psychologically torments Neville with the possibility that Neville’s own potion will kill his pet, and Trevor has a few seconds of gasping terror when he’s momentarily transformed into a tadpole. It’s hard to say whether there’s less total animal cruelty involved (given the animal-based potions ingredients), but at least students aren’t being asked to torture live animals weekly.
McGonagall may be less verbally cruel than Snape-but it’s also possible that she’s not, given how little we see of her in the classroom (and never with the Slytherins). We can’t be sure. But based on what we do see, maybe a lot of students would say, “I see no difference.”
Well, there is a little difference. McGonagall says Snape is far more lenient with Harry over the Sectumsempra attack than she would have been. And Snape doesn’t set students up to be murdered unless Dumbledore orders him to, whereas McGonagall has done so on her own initiative at least once and voluntarily at least three times (since we have no evidence that she objected to Dumbledore’s entrapment scheme in PS/SS or that he suggested the Forest detention, much less coerced her into assigning it). Perhaps rather than McGonagall Junior, Snape is McGonagall Lite. Now with 33% less risk of death!
Do the other teachers follow McGonagall’s shining example?
Flitwick uses a student’s pet for a classroom demonstration (zooming Trevor around the room-we can’t ask Trevor how this compared to a few seconds as a tadpole, but I expect he’d say both were terrible and neither should have happened), show obvious favoritism by falling down from excitement when a famous student arrives in class and by cheerfully supporting the decision to exempt that student from the first-year broom ban, and publicly humiliate a student when he assigns Seamus those lines comparing himself to a baboon as punishment for unsuccessful spellcasting.
The examples of Slughorn’s blatant favoritism would be a long list, so let’s just pause to note one: at his Hogwarts Express gathering, he pointedly and publicly humiliates Marcus Belby by denying him food as soon as Belby lets on that he isn’t close to his famous uncle. Okay, two: imagine all the kids through the decades who knew their teacher wouldn’t take the time to help them, or even learn their names, because they weren’t “connected,” while helping students of equal talent (or lack thereof) gain even more useful connections than they started with.
Trelawney tells Hermione, “I don’t remember ever meeting a student whose mind was so hopelessly Mundane.” Besides being rude, “Mundane” sounds like a dog-whistle for “Muggle.” Hagrid threatens to repeat “Moody’s”s trick of turning Draco into a ferret-which readers ought to take even more seriously than Draco, given that we know Hagrid has already tried to Transfigure one child (Dudley) into an animal to punish the child’s father for insulting Dumbledore. And six staff members collaborated in Dumbledore’s plot to lure a dangerous wizard into the school.
Animal cruelty, favoritism, publicly insulting students, putting students in danger or outright physically harming them-check, check, check, and check.
I could probably find more examples, but I think this is enough to show that these behaviors are entirely acceptable for Hogwarts teachers. Some take advantage more than others, but “not the worst” is not the same as “good” or even “okay.” And again, McGonagall is the Deputy Headmistress as well as a teacher. She sets the bar for what’s acceptable. She’s partly responsible for how her subordinates behave.
Conclusion
Dumbledore as Headmaster is also partly responsible, of course. And given the extreme reactions McGonagall has to anyone questioning him, we might wonder whether he’s more her cult leader than her boss and has warped her judgement. I can think of a number of other factors explaining and even mitigating her behavior: her culture, how she was taught, the crushing workload, etc. She may be fairer and less harsh than her own teachers, as Snape is less harsh (with regard to student safety) than McGonagall. Her relative acceptance of ending corporal punishment suggests that she might deserve some credit for trying to do better.
But that doesn’t help the students who suffer regular insults and humiliation and distress over animal suffering, or become progressively hardened to inflicting animal suffering, or are nearly murdered because of her. McGonagall is unfair, immature, irresponsible, and cruel. She is partly responsible for other teachers’ bad behavior.
She is the worst.