Why the number of students is ambiguous

[olivierfouquet2000]

No: HPFGUIDX 86953

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:
> We've often wondered why JKR seems unsettled as to how 
> many students there are in a House. 70? (7 years times 10 
> students) 200? (The number of Slytherins at a Quidditch match)
> 250? (JKR's interview saying there are about a thousand 
> students at Hogwarts). 
> 
> I think its ambiguous because she is skating her way around 
> group dynamics. She doesn't want to have a dissident faction of 
> Gryffindors, and that would be inevitable (in the real world) if 
> there were hundreds of them. So Harry's house seems to be 
> small.

Now Olivier :
Exactly.  JKR's intent is not to depict a logically consistent world but a psychologically 
consistent one. It is therefore pointless to argue whether it is possible for Hagrid to 
teach a practical Care of Magical Creatures lesson (e.g the Nifflers ones) with both the 
Slytherins and the Gryffindors (that would be around 70 kids if JKR's answer is taken 
literally) or for McGonagall to be the only Transfiguration teacher (she would then be 
teaching 20 of classes of ten students even in the very minimal hypothesis). In both 
cases (and in many more), there are psychological meanings lying beneath and they 
are the ones that really matter.



>  She does want there to be a dissident faction of Slytherins (the 
> ones who stood to honor Harry at the end of GoF), and that 
> wouldn't make sense if there were many fewer than one 
> hundred. Dissidents would  then be perceived as individual 
> non-conformists like Luna,  rather than a fraction of the whole.
> 
> But Rowling wants us to perceive that Slytherin and Gryffindor 
> are the same size, as implied by the classes where there seem 
> to be ten of each.   No wonder we can't get the math to work.
> 
> Pippin

Now Olivier

The troubling thing with HP is that the books are not purely symbolic or psychologic 
(symbolically purer works would be IMO LotR or His Dark Material), they also depict a 
world that is so close to ours that it is possible to identify with it on a realistic ground. 
As I have read in this list (but sadly cannot remind whom to credit for this idea), JKR 
has created a diagonal world. So it is inevitable that the two aspect sometimes 
contradict with no hope of reconciliation. 

Olivier, resident of Symbolic Alley