[ SECRET POST #3220 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3220 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 031 secrets from Secret Submission Post #460.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. http://i.imgur.com/X52ihMX.png

[(Anonymous)]

Why, OP? The wizarding world is much smaller than the muggle one. Therefore there are fewer children to be educated.

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP, but my only problem with this argument is this: I can accept that the wizarding population is very small. However, I can't quite bring myself to believe that there would be enough students just from Great Britain alone to populate a school, if said population was really so small that 11 schools would be enough. Just. There's one school for Great Britain, and then ten for the entire rest of the world?? That doesn't seem to make much sense, population-wise, unless there are a whole lot more wizards in Britain than elsewhere.

[(Anonymous)]

Not all countries use the boarding school model for the age demographic of Hogwarts. Maybe they have smaller day schools where wizarding populations are concentrated.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt

Good point. Unless there's a higher occurrence of wizards in the UK, it makes more sense to have more schools and to have their locations based on population density. Africa gets ONE? Ridiculous. Likewise, surely China has 2-3 at least, ditto India and the U.S. And what about South America? Canada? If it's tradition for schools to mostly accept only students from that country, then doesn't it make more sense for every country to have a school?

... okay, I'm beginning to see what the OP is on about.

[(Anonymous)]

How many schools do you think there should be?

The magical population is pretty small.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's big enough to be self-sustaining even. Well, maybe if you count the worldwide population, but there's not a whole lot of mixing for a people that can travel so quickly and easily. I think they need the wizards born to muggles just to keep the numbers up.

[ketita]

Well, I agree that it's a little improbable, because that means that the wizarding population is beyond miniscule. But I agree with you that it does kind of seem like there should be more of them?

Maybe there are only 11 "official" wizarding schools, but there are small places where they still go by apprenticeships, or tutors, or various types of informal teaching? There would be more wizards then, they just wouldn't be in schools.

[cyren2132]

You just reminded me of a fic I was toying with but never finished a few years long time ago in which Remus Lupin had an unknown son who grew up in an isolated community that essentially gathered its kids together for community education. Until bad things happen and the kid ends up at Hogwarts sorted into Slytherin.

[ibbity]

It does state in book 5, in passing, that some wizarding parents in the UK choose not to send their kids to Hogwarts and instead "teach them at home," which I would assume also covers private tutors etc.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh I always presumed that it depends on how common boarding school is. I mean in the USA and a lot of other places it would be more noticeable if the kids go to school in one place so they are mostly homeschooled.

[sarillia]

After reading these comments, now I'm wondering why the wizarding population is so small. It appears to be a dominant trait since it seems like every muggle/magical cross results in magical children. While there are dominant traits in real life that are rare, it usually means there's something connected to the trait that makes it difficult to have children, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

It just seems like the magical population should have gotten a lot bigger by now.

Oh well, it's hardly the first time the numbers in this series were awkward.

[ibbity]

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me, because:

a) wizards tend to keep to themselves, in fact they try to prevent non-wizards from even knowing that the wizarding world exists. This would tend to mean that wizards are confined to a pretty small breeding pool, relatively speaking. Like any minority which keeps itself relatively isolated from the larger community, they're going to remain a minority as long as they refuse to integrate and intermarry. Even if a few do step outside the group and marry a non-wizard, and have a wizardly kid or two, that isn't going to have an especially birthrate-hoisting effect on the wizarding population. Plus we can't discount the chilling effect that anti-muggle sentiment or legislation probably has had on the tendency of wizards to seek out muggle partners.

b) Wizards probably have had reliable methods of birth control for far longer than muggles have. This means that they've overall probably been having less children than the average population has, for generations. Less children means smaller breeding pool means slower population growth.

c) Women in the wizarding world seem to have historically held a much more equal social position than muggle women. This means that a higher percentage of them probably chose career over marriage, or chose to forgo children in order to pursue a lifestyle/career path that would not easily coexist with children. In only a few decades, this trend + birth control (as mentioned above) have already caused a marked reduction in the birth rate of our normal IRL society---if this has been an accepted norm in the wizarding world for centuries, it makes it highly likely that the wizard birthrate has been similarly low for all those centuries.

tl;dr: it actually does make sense for the wizarding population to remain much smaller than the muggle population if you consider the implications of various aspects of their society

Why is Hogwarts so big?

[(Anonymous)]

Taking this opportunity to ask this question. Hogwarts has hardly any students. Certainly not a castle's worth. Each year brought in, how many, 20-25 new students? They can't be using even most of the space, and since Houses double up for classes...

Re: Why is Hogwarts so big?

[(Anonymous)]

Aesthetics

Re: Why is Hogwarts so big?

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe the magical population was a lot larger when Hogwarts was built?

Re: Why is Hogwarts so big?

[(Anonymous)]

I like the theory I saw put forth somewhere that the current population of Hogwarts when Harry is there is unusually low because his birth year and the years immediately preceding it were the times when wizards who would normally have been having children were busy fighting and dying against Voldemort.

I kind of agree?

[(Anonymous)]

There really are ethnicities in the world with less than 10,000 population.

It's conceivable that wizards are similarly very rare and only found in some parts of the world.

That said, only 11 schools worldwide is very low.

Re: I kind of agree?

[(Anonymous)]

True. Ron does say something in CoS to the effect of "wizards would be dying out if it weren't for muggleborns" (when Hermione's called a mudblood). Given that he's only twelve, this must actually be something that comes up a lot. It's possible there just aren't wizarding populations at all in some areas.

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, do we know that for sure?

I do think that a lot of schools would share pupils from different countries. In my head Durmstrangs always served parts of Eastern and Central Europe, and I think Beauxbatons covers France, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain (poor Portugal). Hogwarts may actually be in the minority in terms of admitting students under one Ministry.


Still think there'd have to be more than 11, though. Unless we're also only counting huge Hogwarts-like schools. It's also possible that more wizarding families don't send their kids to Hogwarts than we realize. (Which might explain a lot.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hogwarts might serve children from Ireland to. Though I have no idea how the whole Irish independence would work in the wizarding world. I mean they have their own quiditch team so there must be some independence.

[(Anonymous)]

In my head canon, there are far more than 11 schools (worldwide), and the wizarding community is far greater than the books suggest.

Certainly, not as numerous as the Muggle population, but big.

I also think (again, head canon here) that families that have particular cultural practices/beliefs (Muggle wise) often have actual magic int he family, but only a few wizards or witches are actually born into the family (i.e. maybe the great grandmother was somewhat a seer, or the uncle had an "uncanny" sense of intuition, and then two generations later a witch or wizard is born, but there already is somewhat of an understanding of the child's magical condition). In some cases, the families might choose to home school (or ship off to a school, provided there is enough money to pay for the school...) or ignore the powers, etc.

Sidenote: I'm so happy you wrote this secret :) I'm on an HP binge, so seeing this and thinking about these things makes me happy. Thanks,OP.

[(Anonymous)]

As a kid I always assumed Hogwarts was one of the smallest wizarding schools, but also maybe the most prestigious? It seems like not every wizard in the UK gets accepted, b/c people make a big deal about it iirc. Maybe everyone else gets homeschooled?

Even if the other schools had several thousand students (compared to Hogwarts' 400 students), that still wouldn't total out to 11 schools worldwide. Maybe the '11 schools' isn't referring to wizarding schools in general, but rather to a sort of Ivy League of wizarding academies.

[(Anonymous)]

Well of course it is the most prestigious, it is British. Duh.

[(Anonymous)]

I had just assumed 11 boarding schools in the European area. The rest of the world with their own education system that doesn't involve one rickety old building.