Hogwarts population and Wizarding culture

[Steve Vander Ark]

No: HPFGUIDX 9729


> numbers of students, wizard society would die out. What we do have 
is 
> a vibrant wizard society with lots of businesses like Bertie Botts, 
> Quality Quidditch Supplies, various professional Quidditch teams, 
> etc., and a seemingly endless bureaucracy at the MoM.  You wouldn't 
> have any of that if the population was that low.

Even a thousand kids is too small if you think of the whole of the 
wizarding world in Britain. I would argue that demographic 
information  and guesses don't really suggest much about the number 
of students at Hogwarts. Not all kids from the wizarding world GO to 
Hogwarts, not NEARLY all. By far the most move into trades (e.g. Stan 
Shunpike, the manager of Flourish and Blotts). It's not that they end 
up uneducated. It's just that they don't need the same kinds of 
scientific and technical education that we in the Muggle World 
consider necessary because their world and life view is different. 
They don't need the technology to maintain the infrastructure, so 
they don't learn it. 

Our own kids' educations wouldn't prepare them to live in the 
wizarding world either. A typical high school student would know a 
whole lot of stuff that in the wizarding world would do nothing but 
make them disbelieve what they were seeing. We scrub the enchantment 
out of kids and replace it with cold hard science. The wizarding 
world scrubs the science out of kids and replaces it with magic. 
Okay, that's a bit harsh in some ways, but the point is a good one.

We Muggles see reality TOTALLY differently, down to the underpinnings 
of everything that we believe, from the way the Wizarding World sees 
it. A famous quote says that "the speed of light will never be broken 
by someone who has already decided that it's impossible." Wizarding 
kids have a different set of things that they know are possible from 
the set of things we teach our Muggle kids. And what we teach our 
kids then requires a whole lot of additional education to give them 
the details. Add to that our assumption that we impart this education 
to ALL kids, regardless, which they clearly don't do in the Wizarding 
World, where you have to have a certain level of magical ability to 
get into the school (e.g. Neville).

So about Hogwarts: in the Wizarding culture, the kids with the most 
inherent magic go to Hogwarts (they're the ones who the magic quill 
chooses), while the rest, with lesser magic abilities, are educated 
in other ways and apprentice into trades.

Steve Vander Ark
The Harry Potter Lexicon
http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon