branchandroot | What happens when you mix periods without a plan

Personal HP worldbuilding which may or may not go toward fic. This is mostly just reading some of

copperbadge's fic and frustration talking.

Becuse, good grief Rowling, could you be sketchier or more illogical if you tried with both hands?

Known: Hogwarts is the only secondary school for wizards in the country.

Known: Rowling says there is no University for wizards in Britain.

Personally known: It is not feasible for such things as research or skilled professions like the medical profession to go on without more intensive education in specific fields than is shown at Hogwarts.

Extrapolation: The population of wizards in comparison to non-wizards must be very small if the entire secondary-schooled population fits in one castle with a mere score of teachers. The population of those who wish to go on to careers requiring tertiary education may, then, be too small to support a university that has sufficient diversity and resources to serve them all. Nevertheless, they must be trained, lest they all kill themselves and each other.

Possibility One: Tertiary education is on the apprenticeship model. Each profession has its own training system and takes care of its own fledglings. Auror's Academy and medical internships, that sort of thing.

Possibility Two: Wizards who require further education in experimental and research procedure share facilities with one or more non-wizard universities, simply 'borrowing' rooms, buildings, libraries and the like, modifying or hiding them as required.

Corollary for Two: Passing the NEWT in Muggle Studies is absolutely required of wizards going on to tertiary studies in such fields.

Possibility Three: British wizards must go abroad to universities that are on the continent in order to get tertiary education.

Conclusion: If Rowling wanted to roll back time in the wizard culture a few hundred years, then she should never have also included institutions such as a ministry offices dedicated to research or a medical profession that appears effective enough to require advanced education and certification.

In addition, the lack of centers for advanced learning implies a certain lack of emphasis or value, in the wizard culture, placed on the study of things that are not immediately useful to a specific vocation. Such study is precisely where a good many advances in understanding the workings of the world around us come from. Particle physics, for example, is not often immediately useful, but discoveries in that field have the potential to eventually accomplish things that are purely imagination right now, and so people study it. Wizard culture does not appear to value that kind of forward drive, witness the antiquated educational system under discussion and their astonishing ignorance of the far larger non-magic culture in which they are lodged.

From which I further conclude that Rowling's wizards actually have good cause to fear discovery by non-wizards, because, magic or no, at this point the Muggles would roll them all up in a few months, if there ever appeared to be a reason to do so. Vandalism, attacks and wanton interference with people's minds would probably provide that reason, should it ever come to light for the population at large.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, if you do the math (assuming that Harry's year is representative of other years) you get 10 students per house (5 girls, 5 boys, isn't it tidy how that works?) and 4 houses, so that comes out to 280 students. Which is... smaller than my entire graduating class in high school, come to think of it, even factoring in everybody who dropped out.

*makes a face* Rowling is good at evoking a world, but she's not much good at the nuts and bolts of building a world, is she?

No, she really isn't. Not the nuts and bolts. Even if you think of Hogwarts as basically the upper class school (practically college itself, if we're working on the couple-hundred-years-ago model) that's just not enough people for the kind of world she /is/ evoking.

And if we're working on that older model, why are there direct analogues of O levels and A levels? I mean really.

Personally, I think it would have worked much better if she had never tried to layer Real World things like big governments and hospitals with multiple wards over the original idea of an endearingly nonsensical magical world.

Yeah--they only have enough kids for one high school, but they have enough professional Quidditch players for a league.

However, I always fanwanked the tertiary-education problem by assuming they all went to the Unseen University.

*grins* Well, they'd be all set to deal with the Librarian, though they might wonder if he ever changes back into his human shape.

Not to mention enough bureaucrats for a Ministerial government, but apparently only one shopping district in the entire country? Oi.

Well, I can believe that last bit--if you start out with one bureaucrat (you don't even need a mixed pair to start with) they propagate unstoppably.

*tears hair out* YES. The statistics of the Wizarding world really annoys me because the world outside Hogwarts seems so much bigger than Hogwarts, but most of them are Hogwarts graduates, only the number of students is incongruous to the population of the British Wizarding world. SO ANNOYING, ROWLING.

Hugely. I think my personal answer for that, in fic, may be that Hogwarts is the only public school, and that less fortunate children have to go to government sponsored secondary schools and get (presumably, though possibly not actually, all things considered) a lesser education. And Rowling just hasn't shown us any of the lesser orders, because she's disgustingly classist that way.

This is just by way of being a thank-you note, because you've provided a gloriously clear, precise illustration of the thing that I'm pretty sure has always made it impossible for me to really engage with these books, despite the many things about them that might otherwise have made them irresistible to me.

I have a growing hypothesis that for many, many readers this sort of thing is invisible, most likely because to see it, you have to look at/have a sense for aspects of reality that simply aren't a part of everyone's normal perceptions of the world. Which seems strange to me, yes, and probably seems strange to you. But more and more, I'm inclined to think that it's like having a sense of direction, or a sense for three-dimensional objects and what they'd look like from some other point in space than the one you happen to be seeing them from -- some people come into the world without those senses, and not having them, will never feel their absence.

Rowling, I think, lacks that sense completely; her mental map of the world is likely entirely based on individual personalities and relationships. She knows in her bones that an aunt and uncle's weirdness over their nephew's talents imply a complex family backstory; she has no such sense that a pro sports league must imply a society large enough to support a team. So people like us twitch. But for readers whose mental maps are like Rowling's -- and they're probably the vast majority -- the issue is completely invisible. And even once it's pointed out, those folks won't get why it would actually bother anyone.

*wry* My pleasure. I'll probably slog through the last book, when it gets here, because I may really want to make articles out of some of my irritation, but it'll be a duty. These things are so persistent and cumulative, Rowling lost me entirely around book five.

I expect you're right about the reason, too. I've seen that kind of thing happen with other books, that people are content to just 'enjoy it for what it is' and not 'analyze it to death'. But, you know, I can't /stop/ doing that (which probably explains why I've stuck with an academic career). Sometimes I can still enjoy a book by having my leisure-mind and critical-mind ride side-by-side, as it were, but Rowling's world is so egregiously unbalanced, I just cant do it with this one.

So I read fic by writers who do have that sense, and that works better.

You've nailed down a couple things that I've been eyeing myself...but I've come to the sad conclusion that I don't think JKR meant for people to think this hard about these holes. When you look at the Wizard population, you do realize how tiny they must be, which sets up a whole slew of problems for them later on. If you've heard of the Marriage Law Challenge set up by WIKTT, (basically it makes people write fanfic on how since purebloods are thinning out and inbreeding is nasty, each bachelor pureblood must wed a magical muggle of their choice...setting up for Snape/Hermione), it doesn't seem like such a ridiculous excuse for smut anymore.

That really does seem plausible, all things considered; as plausible as anything else, at least!

My spouse and I were just talking about how a big deal is made of there being very few pure wizarding communities. Which must mean most wizards live in amongst non-magic communities. But they don't know what a gun is? *shakes head*

What happens when you mix periods without a plan

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