The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (a thread for Potterheads)

"Welcome to Achilles' Closet!"
"You're never going to stop loving that, are you?"
"Nope!"

 

You know, I've been doing a lot of thinking on American schools and their houses, and I'm pretty sure there is a way to have American wizarding schools have houses, but they would work very differently from Hogwarts houses. And I don't mean frats/sororities, because those are a distinctly College thing, and I always saw Hogwarts being more like a high school than a college (but that might be just me).

But anyways--back in Jr. High, each grade was split into two groups, completely arbitrary, just so that it'd be easier to distribute student placement--the two groups were Blue and Gray, I believe? Named after the school's colors. So, for example, the people from the Blue team/group/whatever (it was over a decade ago, I don't remember this shit) would have a set schedule that might go something like English->Math->Science->lunch, whereas the Gray team would have a schedule that went Science->History->English->lunch
And I remember there being a bit of team pride, despite the fact that the team placement was COMPLETELY ARBITRARY AND RANDOM

So I can see a system sort of like that getting implemented in some American Wizarding schools--it's just a way to divide up the student population so it's easier to manage scheduling, and it's completely arbitrary and doesn't actually MEAN anything but because people are people, they'd still make it into a "MY TEAM IS BETTER THAN URS" thing. And it'd have nothing to do with being modeled after Hogwarts, it'd be based entirely on practicality and "how can we make it so we can get maximum efficiency out of scheduling shit"

Also, American Wizarding schools would absolutely have a stricter curriculum than Hogwarts seemed to have.

I dunno, just thoughts.

 

Hogwarts has a super-light curriculum and doesn't teach things that really ought to be prereqs for some of its classes. Its grads have gotta be the worst writers and have the worst spelling. And can't do math. And have some very strange ideas about where babies come from.

 

Yeah, that's fair actually. I remember similar methods in my middle school, though we were just A, B, and C (based on our lunch hour designation) and ours was a little more reliant on the classes you wanted to take.

I could totally see American wizard school doing something like that-- maybe one set of 'houses' for the 11-14 year olds, and then once the actual choice in curriculum set in, a rotating set that mattered more on your classes. You'd still get those 'personality' divides too, because the kids interested in transfiguration/DADA/charms/etc are going to probably be a little different from the kids interested in herbology/potions/magical creatures/etc, and different still from the kids who get wholly invested in arithmancy/astrology/divination/etc, and so on.

So you have your 'pure spellwork/learning is superior' versus your 'practical potions and spellwork is more fun' versus your 'we're gonna kill all the badguys!!' versus your 'plotting the course of the future/exploring the strangeoutreaches of magic is soooo interesting' cliques and 'house' pride, which has very little to do with arbitrary house designation and way more to do with arbitrary class stacking.

It'd be really cool to explore something like that actually? Especially if you used a track method, where instead of science/language/arts as the divide, different magical subdivisions were the track. And then your core classes, which would definitely include such petty things as 'history of things other than European magical communities' and 'basic algebra'.

(Petty note: no wonder all the bankers in JKR's UK were goblins. I am not entirely sure any of the humans learned what compounding interest ever was.)

 

That had occurred to me too.

...oh my god, I just imagined, what if the reason Hogwarts has no formal math classes is because of wizard racists being like "advanced math is for GOBLINS and we are ABOVE IT." This makes very little sense and yet is weirdly compelling to me.

 

I really like that idea of the "houses" (or whatever they end up being called) being more reliant on class choices for American schools! Feels very like something that American schools would do, lol. Also somewhat reflective of the STEM/Arts divide.

Would that mean, though, that "houses" were kind of standardized among American schools? Like, they're more or less the same from one school to the next?

 

We had divisions but it was more based on who went to school and when. Basically depending on what track you were (A-D track) you would have different vacation periods. My high school had a variety of different programs too, some of which were at war with one another and would shittalk one another. The one I was in combined English and history courses into one double period with two teachers, as a sort of weird making history and literature live via each other thing. The AP kids all thought there were fancier. Fuck the AP kids was the view of many. The performing arts school I went to meanwhile basically split up people into one art and again there was weird competition because clearly the dance kids are fucking loser assholes. Not like us the superior music kids and whoever sees ANYTHING from the drama kids? Never. Because they suck. We do not speak of the twirly rod people.

 

Maybe I´m overly forgiving, but tbh I´ve always imagined there were other classes that just weren´t mentioned because they weren´t plot relevant? -shrugs- If Hogwarts were a terrible school and leave people unable to live in at least the wizard community, it wouldn´t be known for being such a very Good school in canon.

 

My middle school did the "split people into blocks" thing, kind of; in 6th grade, half the grade got one set of core subject teachers, and the other half got a different set. In high school the groups were way less formal and it was more that there were, say, some people who were in a ton of honors classes. Though I was severely out of tune with student culture in high school, what with the homeschool and college courses.

 

I think one of the ideas in Sage Canyon (I'm not sure if we fully talked it through?) was that the "houses" (dorms) were associated more with particular subjects, because we were modelling it after more of an agricultural school than a posh prep school. So you would be basically choosing an area of major, with the personality traits more of a general idea and a dorm culture built up around each one.

 

That would probably depend on how many schools there are! If there were over a hundred, I imagine curriculum based housed would probably have a core culture that carried over to almost every school with minor tweaking, but if there were maybe twenty fairly large schools, it's possible for them to have competing tracks, different tracks (instead of herbology/potions/magical creatures, something like potions/charms/DADA-- moving from a 'life sciences' track to a 'law enforcment' track) and very distinct cultures. There would probably be a general overlap just because of kids relating heavily to their classes, but you could have completely distinct houses even with shared house structures.

(I thiiiink that they actively posted full schedules in book... three? And Hermione's was commented on as being Ridiculous. The number of essays for classes like History and Transfiguration were probably meant as a stand-in for language arts classes, and I could see an argument for potions being the only math you'd need. It's a stupid argument, but if there is some kind of secondary schooling, I guess that's where things like business owners learn their stuff. Most wizards/witches seemed to either work on perfecting new spells (and then selling books about them), work in a small business, or work for the Ministry. The only ones we see outside of that are teachers and the landed nobility in the form of purebloods.)

 

I'm mostly being Doylist with this bit of complaining- we see course lists! They include classes which have no impact on the plot! Yet there is never anything to indicate English or Math teachers. I think JKR just didn't include "mundane" subjects because it was so much more fun to write about a school that's all about magic, which was fine early on, but as the series tried to be more serious later and point out the flaws in the society it created, it opened that kind of stuff up for critique, too.

 

Caltech is a wizard school and the dorms are houses

 

I am also reminded of Eliot's very pointed commentary on magic school and how it pulls kids out of the 'mundane world' and then actively avoids the subjects that would help them survive it in Turn of the Story.

What better way to make sure muggleborns stay in the magic community where they belong? Make sure they can't operate outside of it! (This is a very cynical interpretation but not necessarily out of line with how wizards think in canon.)

 

I didn't get the impression most wizards are nearly aware enough of what it's like outside the magic community to have any idea what skills Muggles need, though.

 

That's also true. Didn't JKR say something about the concentration of muggleborns is exceptionally high for Harry's generation because of the war with Voldemort?

 

Hooo boy that headcanon makes a lot of sense, actually. If wizards have magic to do most chores and house elves to do the rest and goblins to run the banks and a whole bunch of other magical creatures they are exploiting the shit out of, I can see a purely theoretical magic based education being a sign of "good breeding"- not having to concern yourselves with such earthly affairs and instead dedicating your time to philosophical and....we need a fancier word than magical that means magical... pursuits. Plus it perpetuates the class barrier- if you can't afford to have house elves (even if its free labor you need money to pay for food and enough space to house them) then you have to spend more time on maths and such that you didn't learn in school. Plus if you don't learn math than you usually have trouble with economics because holy shit that is hard. If you have magic slaves to manage your estate its fine, but those who don't stay in the poverty cycle.

 

Majyckyll.

In fairness to the books, Harry was basically railroaded into an Auror style career track, and they did have those career planning discussions after the OWLs, but... well, Harry was railroaded into Auror-track because it fit the story. And a lot of the fluff in terms of worldbuilding is that, decoration without substance, so we have no good idea of what magical education outside of a Auror-track looks like.

 

Thaumaturgical.

 

I still think it would have been way more fitting, sensible, and narratively-satisfying to have him end up as DADA professor.