Ummmm… no. Just because I didn’t fall head over heels for the series doesn’t mean I condemn it and anything similar.
I came here to write this. I aged with the books timeline as well. I don’t treat it like a huge deal either, but I do fondly remember all the books.
I think one of the bigger selling points for the books is the bathrooms.
[ul][li]the troll destroys the girls’ room[/li][li]the chamber of secrets mostly takes place in the girls room (and for adults, “chamber of secrets” is a nice double entendre)[/li][li]Dumbledore finds the Come-&-Go room when he has an urgent need[/li][li]Harry and Draco have a big fight in the boys’ room[/li][li]the three kids enter the MofM through magical public toilets[/ul][/li]Rowling had a disturbingly incisive grasp on what children like, and a good sense of how to write for them – her style is as close to journeyman-artless as you can get, but that is fine for youngsters, and her constructive imagination is excellent.
Are you really going to tell me my FEELINGS about your statement aren’t valid? The correct way to say that would be “gee, that wasn’t what I meant.”
I believe Rowling has said that most kids from wizarding families are home schooled (the Weaselys were).
If you go to Pottermore, there’s a LOT of background info. It’s a neat site, and it also contains a lot about the movies as well. (Hardcore geeks can even get sorted into a house and be assigned a “wand”. If you’re REALLY dedicated, you can also get your house at the American school as well)
The Harry Potter Wiki is a good one too.
in one of the HP ps2 games they had a wing that said “muggle/mundane studies” so we figured it was math and such…
I remember what childrens books were like before HP 
From '67 to '97, publishers were publishing short books for children, teenagers, and young adults. There was a consensus about what young people wanted, it was focused on poor readers, and it excluded long books.
That hadn’t always been the case: in the 30’s the “Swallows and Amazons” series by Arthur Ransom were long books, with, (in my opinion) comparable literary merit. But publishers weren’t publishing that kind of book, and libraries weren’t buying that kind of book.
So, IMO, Bloomsbury showed considerable courage in publishing HP – and it paid off. It turns out that there is in fact still a market for long books with a strong plot and easy language.
The rest of it is genre fiction - school story, bording school story, fantasy. It’s not very original, and it doesn’t have to be. If it was written in the short-action style of the 70’s, it would be just another 70’s book. If it was written in serial form, it would be just another 1870’s book. But it’s not: it’s a long-form novel, and it appeared in a market that was starved for that kind of book.
When the first book came out, it had this cover in Britain (and Australia etc), which coloured my expectations of it. It felt like many books I had read before, the Diane Duane or Diana Wynne Jones type of books that had a gentle comedic “safe” feel. And I think that, though the story subsequently got to be very serious and epic, that was sort of what Rowling was going for when starting out, because the way she portrays things like Hogwarts, the Wizard World, and Quidditch, are all very simplistic and superficial. They’re amazing and weird and wonderful and odd, but they’re not properly thought out to any exacting degree.
Over time she managed to flesh things out a little, but most of the school stuff was tertiary to the plot and the characters, just background fluff for world-building and atmosphere. I’m sure if you wanted to you could come up with a more solidified way the Wizarding World operates that would both make sense and still fit with what we know of it in the books, and we shouldn’t make the mistake, therefore, to assume that what’s written on the page for expediency’s sake is all there is.
I’ll forgive you, given that you say it is only your opinion they are of comparable literary merit.
Because the undisputed fact is that the “Swallows and Amazons” series are of far, far greater literary merit. 
I fully agree with that!
Just a follow up:
The characters in the Swallows and Amazons series are the most real children I’ve ever come across in fiction.
Unlike most series, the books get better and better as the series goes on, and the quality of the writing gets smoother and more skillful. In fact, the writing is so good that it seems effortless. You don’t even notice how expertly written it is, unless you intentionally look for it. Also the books don’t follow any pattern, and each book has its own unique flavour and charm.
Another refreshing thing about the Swallows and Amazons series is that Arthur Ransome is not trying to push any point of view. There is no ‘message’, there are no little moral lessons. The characters don’t have to resolve personal differences among themselves and ‘become better people’. There are hardly any villains or ‘bad guys’. Nothing very implausible happens.