[HPforGrownups] website SPOILERS . Who goes to Hogwarts

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 119745

Lexicon Steve wrote
>What I immediately noticed is that she only half-way answered the
>question. So did Stan Shunpike go to Hogwarts? How common is it for
>people NOT to go? All this tells us is that the invitation goes out.
>What percentage of people say yes? If almost everyone says yes, then
>the total number of school age Wizarding children in Britain is
>frightfully small -- at most a thousand, as per Jo's comment. That's
>the size of a small high school in the United States, and most
>communities have a number of such high schools.

This really is the biggie, for those anoraks among us who are interested in
the contextual side of things.

If nearly all families take up the offer of a place, then we'd probably be
looking at a wizarding population of somewhere above 25,000. But that's hard
to reconcile with canon - is it _really_ reasonable, for example, to
conceive of 4 x the entire population of the British Isles turning up for
the Quidditch World Cup final? Or indeed, that number of people providing
the fan base for the number of professional Quidditch sides that we know
exist.

But we have got some wriggle room to speculate about how many families would
not take up the invitation...

Two things did interest me: the first being that either someone is wizarding
folk or they're not, and the second being that there _is_ a wizarding gene,
which unfortunately detracts from some of the equally elegant theories of
what governs wizard numbers and where the Hogwarts line is drawn.

Cheers

Ffred

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