Readers adore the world Rowling created in the Harry Potter series for many reasons, but I believe a primary though largely unremarked-upon driver is our desire to learn in the style of Hogwarts.

In a prodigious feat of intellectual wizardry, Rowling has sketched for us an exemplary model for 21st-century learning, based on the 19th-century English boarding school plus Renaissance alchemical hierarchies and theories of magic, with a dash of ancient Greek paideia thrown in.

Learning at Hogwarts is hands-on, experimental, full of deliciously informative failures. Potions fizzle and explode, spells go awry (sometimes with alarming consequences), mandrakes shriek when pulled out of their pots, griffins throw their riders. Of course, library work features prominently, but so too does the demonstrating of what one has learned, usually in the most public of settings.

In Harry, Ron and Hermione's world, young people must band together to identify and solve very real-world problems (such as defeating the assault of He Who Shall Not Be Named-- just, oh, the end of the world before tiffin), often with only the loosest of guidance by the adults. In fact, instructors at Hogwarts frequently evade or obscure the queries of their students, at times deliberately mislead their charges.

Hogwarts enables learners to take control of their own learning, to set and achieve common goals together, and-- above all-- to nurture curiosity and creativity. Voldemort (oops!) has many guises, an endless supply of tactics, is probably smarter than you are....but Rowling reassures us that we can learn in ways that will allow us to adjust successfully to whatever an uncertain, rapidly changing future may hold.

P.S. Rowling expands on bits of her learning philosophy in her 2008 Commencement Address at Harvard, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination."

Daniel Rabuzzi is Executive Director at Mouse.