So, Hogwarts.

[conuly]

What do they do if the non-wizarding parents don't want their child to go to Hogwarts? Is the kid still subject to Ministry laws regarding the use of magic? What if the parents have a good reason (unlike the Dursleys) to prevent their kid from learning magic? Maybe a religious reason, or something...?

And Hagrid! We know there's Kwikspell catalogs used by squibs. Why can't he now study to pass a few OWLs, even some NEWTs and become a qualified wizard? Be allowed to do magic, y'know? Are there age restrictions on those tests or something?

And why exactly doesn't the wizarding world have primary schools? Do they have universities? Is there any option for those who want their children to go to school and have a bit more of a well-rounded education than Hogwarts offers, without having to leave the country...?

Edit: And how many students are in Hogwarts, anyway? We know JKR says about 1,000, which is possible if Gryffindor is the smallest house, but there's a lot of other evidence against this. Carriages hold 3 - 5 students, and it only takes around hundred of them to take all the students into the castle (which sets the school's population at no more than about 600). During the DADA OWL that Harry saw, there's only about 100 seats (which makes the population about 700). Does JKR, in fact, possess basic math skills? Should we converge upon her house with tutors and calculators, and, failing that, decent editors for both her books and her site?

Comments

[beccaviola.livejournal.com]

Hello, cruised randomly in :)

There are about 40 students in Harry's year. We know this without a shadow of doubt - JKR's made that pretty clear.

Allowing for fluctuations a bit (a baby boom sometime after the first defeat of Voldemort seems likely, for instance) that gives us 7 years x 40ish = somewhere in the region of 280 and almost certainly less than 300 students.

Expanding that to the wizarding population, if the average wizard lives for something like 150 years - as has been implied - and there are 40 wizarding births a year (or at least ones that survive long enough to start at Hogwarts - insert theory on the fate of disabled children here) that gives us a rough magical population of about 6000 in the country, including a small number of Muggleborn children who haven't yet started at Hogwarts and so made themselves 'known' to the wizarding world.

What that essentially means is that population density all over the country is so incredibly low that it'd be financially impossible to run specific, local, wizarding primary schools. Hogsmeade, the only all-magical village in the UK, is just that - a village. A small village, it sounds like. Assuming it has an equal spread of ages, and a population of, say, 200 perhaps, that's only going to produce 9 or 10 primary school aged children.

This comment is threatening to turn into an essay, so I'll stop here...

Cheers. :)

[conuly]

We know this without a shadow of doubt - JKR's made that pretty clear.

Where? *is curious*

What that essentially means is that population density all over the country is so incredibly low that it'd be financially impossible to run specific, local, wizarding primary schools.

These are people who can teleport wherever they like by stepping into fireplaces. Why not run one primary school for wizard-born children, where they floo there in the morning, floo home when they're done?