Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Contex

[Steve]

No: HPFGUIDX 105886

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Shaun Hately" <drednort at a...>
wrote:
>
> ...EDITED...
> 
> A 1000 year old boarding school with the traditions of educating 
> every prominent member of its society.
> 
> It'd become a major public school almost by default.
> 
> See, if we had evidence Hogwarts had copied the Muggle model at 
> some stage, things wouldn't be as clear cut - but because Hogwarts 
> is "steeped in traditions" (I agree with that) it seems to me 
> unlikely that they would have discarded their own evolutionary 
> process to just copy a Muggle one.
> 
> ...EDITED...
> 
> Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
> Shaun Hately 


Asian_lovr2:

As always very interesting. As I read your post, especially your
emphasis on the long history of Hogwarts, it seemed reasonable for us
to speculate on the natural and likely progression of Hogwarts from a
practical stand point.

-Houses-

The ancient fictional tradition of wizards and socerers has been to
take on one or more apprentices. These tales usually being with a
downtrodden young soul deep in the woods who meets a mysterious
stranger. Later that stranger appears at the boy's (usually a boy)
house, and offers his parent an extremely substantial sum of money if
they will allow the boy to travel with him, and be his apprentice.
Although, the exact trade to which he is being apprenticed is never
clearly stated. The 'stranger' assures the parent that the boy will be
well treated, well fed, and highly educated. The parents, usually dirt
poor, agree for both the money and for the great opportunity which
they themselves could never give the kid.

Long winded, but the point is, that it's standard fair for wizards to
select students and train them.

Hogwarts founders thought of a better way. Instead of wandering about
the country side and stumbling across likely candidates, they would
start a school where young wizard could come from far and wide to be
trained.

But Hogwarts is founded by four individual wizards who most likely
look for different traits in their apprentices, and trained them in a
different way. So in a sense, the beginning of Hogwarts was the
combining of four separate apprentice-type schools of wizardry. 

Since we have 4 approaches to selecting and training, in a sense 4
schools, it makes sense that under the banner of the one school, these
sub-schools would become Houses.

Point- the creation of houses was a natural and logical progression.

The next logical progression would be for the founders to see the
efficiency of training the students as a large united group, rather
than Slytherin teaching Slytherin, and Gryffindor teaching Gryffindor.
The natural progression here would be, instead of one teacher teaches
all, one teacher would teach Transfigurations and another would teach
Charms, etc...

Now the school grows, and the number of students becomes significant.
It's one thing to keep track of a dozen personal apprentices, but
quite another to keep track of and manage hundreds of students.

So the founders needed some assistance, so senior trusted students
were made Prefects.

...need to maintain discipline - house points, detention, etc...

...need to keep the student occupied and happy - quidditch, and school
clubs

...need to reduce conflict and stimulate unity and loyalty - various
house competitions, uniforms, etc...

My overal point is that Boarding Schools evolved into the form that
they did out of necessity and logical evolution. It's a reasonable and
effective way to run a boarding school.

>From a practial perspective certain things need to be done, and they
devised reasonable, logical, and somewhat universal ways of doing them.

Just a thought.

Steve/asian_lovr2