Wizarding Education (number of students at Hogwarts followed by long digress

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Shaun Hately" <drednort at a...>
wrote:

> I confess to being just slightly annoyed with HPFGU at the moment - 
> I sent a very large post, which I put a lot of research into, to 
> the main list last week, and received virtually no comments about 
> it at all. No reason I should I suppose... it's just very 
> disappointing - especially when I see that far less detailed posts 
> on the same types of issues spark a lot of discussion.

Was that your post on MQ? Or maybe I haven't gotten to it yet -- I'm
still more than 1000 posts from caught up. The MQ post was very good
-- one problem with covering topic thoroughly is that there isn't much
left for people to say in reply. Like "Oh, the wizarding world is not
quite as corrupt as I thought: it admits children to school based
entirely on merit and not on their parents' political influence"?

As for my model of wizarding education, I have always figured that
wizards would be more advanced than Muggles in many things,
considering that they founded a school, built a castle, and put flush
toilets in it more than a thousand years ago. And have been making
wands (and keeping track of calendars) since 237 BC. But I could be
wrong ... May's Wizard of the Month, Felix Summerbee, invented
Cheering Charms in IIRC 1447 -- anyway, so recently that I was totally
shocked. Maybe they are far more primitive than I thought, and
distinctly behind us Muggles.