My Theory on the Number of Hogwarts students

[rachelrenee1]

No: HPFGUIDX 31514

I am new to this group, in a way.  I have spend quite a number of 
hours in the last few days reading archived posts, past posts, and 
the lexicon.  So I feel like I know ya all, by now.  :-)

Anyway, I am a little nervous about my being on probation status, so 
(with my nice thirst to prove myself) I want to show that I am not a 
big dunderhead.  So here I present my theory about how we can 
logically explain the number of Hogwarts students.

I know this has been much debated in HP circles, but I have thought 
about this long and hard. Tell me what you think.

Ok, we know only 2 things for sure. 

1) There are 5 Griffindor boys, and at least 3 girls (Hermione, 
Lavender and Parvati) in Harry's year in Griffindor(but I agree that 
there are 5, due to Lupin's boggart lesson in which there are 2 
unnamed griffindor 3rd year students. It would make sense they were 
girls.) 

2) Rowling said there are about 1000 students at Hogwarts.

Ok, so how do we reconcile these seemingly contadictory ideas? Well, 
I posit that Occam's Razor could apply here. (i.e. the simplest 
solution is usually the right one.)

So here is my theory. 

1) Think back to your high school. There are a lot of groups of kids 
right? In thinking of mine there were 1) the rank and file 
hardworkers who got little attention in and of themselves. This was 
most of the student body. I would call them Hufflepuffs. 2) There 
were the gifted and talented kids in honors classes. A smaller group 
than the first, but still, a pretty big number. I would call these 
the Ravenclaws. 3) The kids everyone steered clear of. We called them 
the stoners. You know, the ones who fight, skip class, etc. The "bad" 
kids. Not as big a group as 1 or 2. I would point these out as the 
Slyterins. 4) Those kids who were the ones everyone wanted to be. In 
my school it was the student council. They were popular, but I swear 
they knew almost everyone's name (there were over 1000 kids at my 
high school) and they went out of their way to say hi and be nice to 
the whole school. Good kids that all the students liked (maybe not 
the stoners) and all the teachers enjoyed having in their classes. I 
would call these "above and beyond" students the Griffindors.

My point is that, just because the Griffindor class that Harry is in 
is quite small, doesn't mean that they all are. I imagine that 
Hufflepuff is probably a big house. A lot of kids who are basically 
hard workers, but not really outstanding in any huge way. So I think 
that the distribution of students in houses is not necessarly 
proportional.

And 2) I think that the number of students each year varies, as it 
does in a real life school. JKR said in one of the Scholastic 
interviews there is a magic quill that detects the birth of a magical 
child and writes it in a book at Hogwarts and McGonagall checks it 
every year and sends notices out to those turning 11. Could it not be 
possible that there are some years in the wizard world where there 
are more kids born than others? Maybe the equivelant of a wizard baby-
boom. So I think some years would be big and some smaller. And I 
believe that Harry's year would be really, really small. Mainly 
because the year he was born would have been a fairly bad year for 
having kids. What with the wizarding world in complete chaos with 
Voldemort at the height of his powers, I think that a lot of wizards 
would not be choosing to have children at that point because of the 
fear of bringing kids into that kind of awful, unstabel world. (Hehe, 
back to the wizard copntraception debate that has raged since the 
club moved to this fourm) So hence a very small class eleven years 
later.  But I would think that in a big baby-boom year Hogwarts would 
not turn away wizard children, due to an enrollment cap.

So how, you may ask, so I reconcile this with the statement that 
Dumbledore magicked "hundreds of squashy, purple sleeping bags" ? 
Well, there could be about 970 kids, give or take, and it would still 
be "about 1000." And he could magic hundreds of sleeping bags without 
it being 1000.

Ok, I have thought long and hard, what do you think? Could this 
answer work? 


"rachelrenee1"