Why did the founders retain Slytherin's house?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 117822


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "lupinlore" 
<bob.oliver at c...> wrote:
er than three.
> 
> 5) The most interesting possibility, as flypaper for Dark 
Wizards and  racists.  They may have realized/expected that most 
students with  Dark tendencies would end up in Slytherin.  By 
allowing the House to  continue they insured such students 
would be easy to spot and  observe.  Similarly, they probably 
realized that pureblood theorists  would tend to find their way into 
Slytherin, and could be contained  and observed as well. < 

In the first place, Slytherin wasn't kicked out for being a Dark 
Wizard or for his pure blood policies. He was already taking only 
pureblood students when the school first started, and despite 
that, he worked in harmony with the others for many years. And 
as nobody knew about the Chamber, it is unlikely that anyone 
could prove he had gone dark. 

Conversely, if he were openly a dark wizard, he wouldn't have 
had to keep the existence of the chamber a secret.  Since he 
was such a good friend of Godric Gryffindor, he probably wasn't 
evil to begin with. 

Perhaps his desire for power led him to experiment with dark 
magic in secret, like Saruman in LOTR. No doubt Salazar 
believed that he, being of nature's nobility, was too noble to be 
corrupted by it. 


But Salazar left because he wanted *all* the houses to adopt his 
purebloods only policy, "Slytherin wished to be more _selective_ 
about the students admitted to Hogwarts. He believed that 
magical learning should be kept withinall-magic families. He 
disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to 
be untrustworthy. After a while, there was serious disagreement 
on the subject between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and Slytherin left 
the school." --CoS ch 9

So when Slytherin left, did he take all his students with him? I 
doubt it. I would say that then as now, Slytherin is a house 
divided, and there are and were  families with children in 
Slytherin who thought Salazar had become too extreme. 

Anyway, as I said on another thread, all the houses are racist. It's 
just that the Slytherins carry the definition of halfbreed a little 
further. 

Pippin