Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2004-06-22 02:26 am
azurelunatic) wrote2004-06-22 02:26 am
Wizarding Education: speculation
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ataniell93 ranted about Dumbledore's pity hires, and how he could surely get the cream of Britain's wizarding population to choose from when it comes to teachers, instead of picking bottom-of-the-barrel choices like Trelawney, Snape, and Hagrid. But I submit to you: what if that was the best he could get? My thought started out with Dumbledore, and how his supporters think he's the best thing since floating broomsticks, and how his anti-supporters think he's a barmy old nutter or worse. Anybody who's Anybody in wizarding society pays careful respect to Dumbledore unless they're one of the open opposition, but look who the people closest to him seem to be, judging by the members of the Order: the Weasleys, fugitives from the law, werewolves, Death Eater double agents, and Mundungus Fletcher. Does that look like the majority of the wizarding population actually puts their trust in Dumbledore? Um, no. I'd guess that the majority of the wizarding population is right where Az-the-Elder and I would be: hunkered down in the Wizarding equivalent of Switzerland, ready to come out after all the fighting's over and get on with our lives. (
garnetdagger would pack me off there in an instant, and she'd pull a Need with a sword, only without the stab-through-heart bit. (Erm, for those who don't follow Lackey, she'd transfer her spirit into an already-magical sword and soul-bond with a lucky user.) ) Then I started thinking about the size of Hogwarts. It looks like there are relatively few students there. Like, perhaps 30 to a year in a House. There are seven years at Hogwarts, and four houses. That's 840 students, approximately. Now figure in another eleven years of wizarding kids that aren't at Hogwarts yet at the same rate, not counting the inevitable post-war baby boom that's going to be hitting Hogwarts when Ginny gets there. At eleven times 120, that's 1320 wizarding kids who'll be going through Hogwarts who have already been born, at the current rate. So. 2160 wizarding children under the age of majority in Wizarding Britan.
Now. What's a typical wizard family size? We've got the Malfoys, and I am guessing that Draco is an only child. Harry's an only child, and I think Hermione may be as well. We've got a couple sets of siblings around, and then we've got the Weasley clan. Is it safe to guess that wizarding family sizes may be, on average, around the same as Muggle family sizes? The average Muggle family hereabouts has around 2 kids for a 2 parent household. So double the number of kids about, and you've got their parents and probably some of the wizards of family-raising age who haven't had children to make up for the Weasleys. 4320 wizards. Double that again if you want to think about the usual wizard lifespan being longer than a Muggle lifespan... 8640.
9,000 people is a very small number. According to Ireland's census, a town of 1,500 is the dividing line between town and rural. If there were a wizarding population of only this size, there could only be maybe ten very small wizarding communities, discounting all the rest of the scattered wizards.
No, there have to be more wizards than that, and that means more children. The wizarding children have to be going somewhere else to learn their craft. My thought on the matter is this: the vast majority of the Traditional Old Blood are looking at this Wizarding Academy and saying "Pfa! Academy? I apprenticed, my father apprenticed, his father apprenticed, and if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for you, and stop whingeing about this Hogwarts letter. Hogwarts? Hogwash, I say!"
That's where the brains that have got to be in wizarding society are going. The Hogwarts students are quite probably the progressive, the rich, the Muggleborn, and the pretensious. Snape's peers are supervising their work and their journeymen, and the journeymen are bossing the apprentices around. Any kid too young to apprentice is probably still being chased after by the homemaker parent and/or nurse.
Hogwarts is an Ancient and Noble House, but it hasn't been around for any 2,000 years. Another five hundred years from now, more wizard-born wizards may go there, but for now, it's still experimental, and the Slytherin Problem (put all the ambitious ones in one house, and a few rotten ones can throw the whole barrel into suspicion) is proving out the "I told you so"s of the grans who won't hear of anything other than apprenticing the kids.
no subject
It also fits the feel of the books. All of the adults seem to have at least passing knowledge of one another, which fits with a smaller population.
Thanks for running the numbers, either way. I've got a HP campaign (set at Durmstrang, not Hogwarts) which those should help with.
More wizards?
Take it another way. The shop that sells wands ha to sell, say, at least one wand a day in order to stay open for business. (Otherwise, it would be like a "FIrst Saturday" flea market or "Tuesday Morning" specialty shop that did limit opening to a particular date.) Is a wand is pretty nearly a once-in-a-lifetime purchase; like braces for your teeth or Lasik eye-surgery? Or like a mattress or auto, something you replace every five to ten years? Or is it something you buy several times a year, like jeans? I'd guess more like once in a lifetime. So the shop sells at minimum 250 wands a year. If lifespans are 160 years, the wizard population is stable, and the shop is continuously selling -- never saturating the market and going out of business -- the market/population is, what, 40,000?
If the shop sells more than one wand a day the market is larger. (Likely) If wands endure less than one lifetime the market may be smaller. (This seems less likely.)
Or have I made a math calculation error?
no subject
First, wands aren't once in a lifetime purchases. Ron's wand had to be replaced, and presumably others have needed repair. I'd say one third of work would be of this sort, rather than new wands for new wizards; you seem to have made a much lower assessment.
Second, you're assuming that keeping the shop open is a big expense. I got the feeling the wandmaker lived in or above his shop, and did his crafting there. Wands apparently take a bit of work, so he will be there even if he isn't actively selling. He's working alone, rather than with apprentices and shopkeeps bustling around him, which seems to bear this out.
Third, if Diagon Alley is a mall, its a small one. Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor, MI (pop 100,000) massively dwarfs it, both in size and number of shops. Steeplegate Mall in Concord, NH (pop 40,000) is also somewhat bigger. Both of these have other shops in the area as competition. Diagon Alley seems to be the only major shopping area in HP; even Nocturne Alley is just a side street off of it.
I don't disagree that even as Headmaster of Hogwarts, Dumbledore doesn't seem to garner that much respect. I can't remember the high-school principal having much influence (outside of school) in my town. Even if he was a WWII special forces veteran, I could easily see him being ignored.
Re: More wizards?
...I actually would compare wands to computers, perhaps, if people in certain specialty jobs replace their wands on a regular basis and most common users of wands don't. Hm.
no subject
Britain's got just under 60,000,000 people. http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/s_fco.htm That same chart also shows minorities by location. The minorities listed are in the totals of hundred thousands each. 30 thousand wizards would be a mere blip in 60,000,000 people. 9,000 would have trouble finding each other.
no subject
Your arguments hold fairly well, though. Even with tweaking of assumptions, Diagon Alley seems made for a population of 30-40 thousand. Hogwarts doesn't seem large enough to teach the children of a population that size, and the nearest schools of any repute are on the Continent.
Muggle demographics (http://england.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm) indicate that roughly 15% of the muggle population in England is school age. Given the doubled life span you posit, that would be roughly 7.5% of the population. That would be between two and three thousand potential Hogwarts students. Other (http://www.hp-lexicon.org/hogwarts/hogwarts_how_big.html) estimates of student body size place it anywhere between three hundred and one thousand students.
So a fair number of wizards, especially pure bloods, are not school trained. They are apprenticed, or more rarely, self-taught. The ratio of muggles to mages is still 2000:1, which makes things like St. Mungoes and Platform 9 1/2 understandable.
Again, my HP Durmstrang campaign thanks you... (http://www.hp-lexicon.org/hogwarts/hogwarts_howmany.html)
no subject
For some reason, I just like to play with numbers...
no subject
no subject
Snape and Hagrid are really perfectly good samples of their trade.
You won't find a better Potions master than Snape, and he's not a bad teacher by some definitions (There are profs at Mudd just like him in some regards). Sure, he's harsh, but that's because potions is an exacting subject that it really sucks to get wrong, and it's better to have Snape chewing your head off than, say, it exploding.
Hagrid, I'll give you, isn't the best teacher in the world - better at dealing with animals than with kids - but he does have certain advantages. One of which is that the kids are likely to get experience with beasties they ordinarily wouldn't be allowed anywhere near, and Hagrid can (mostly) keep them under control, becaues he's just like that. Not so good at shoving the kids through OWLs, I'll admit, but I'll bet money that if you took a kid that really wanted to learn about beasties and introduced him to Hagrid, he'd learn more than with some guy who just wanted everyone to pass their OWLs.
Can't say much good about Trelawney, and wouldn't really like to say that Dumbledore keeps her around and pretends she's a good teacher just so he can hear her prophecies - seems a little unfair to the kids who need to pass exams, doesn't it? But that's probably what he does. Not that he thinks of it like that. But Trelawney's probably the Hogwarts equivalent of that prof who's useless at teaching undergrad classes, but you give tenure anyway because their research is just brilliant. And it might be that Dumbledore has a low opinion of the version of divination taught students anyway - he might say that any divination done without the gift for prophecy is all balderdash anyway, and he only bothers having it taught at all because it's required.
Or, maybe he keeps Trelawney around just to keep Harry's prophecy under wraps...
no subject
My "bottom-of-the-barrel" comment references Az-the-Elder's rant on the topic: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ataniell93/221874.html
no subject
no subject