THEORY: Hogwarts curriculum

[Nora Renka]

No: HPFGUIDX 112126

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, annegirl11 at j... wrote:

<snip>

> So, my theory is that in the vast areas of the kids' schooling that 
> we don't see, they are learning literature, creative and academic 
> writing, basic arithmetic, even music or art. The classes are just 
> divided differently. I can see how art would be part of Care of 
> Magical Creatures (because you have to draw what you see), early 
> Arithmancy probably teaches "muggle" math as a foundation (in a 
> wizarding way that doesn't marginilize non-mathy kids), maybe the 
> kids learn literature in several classes by reading classic books 
> related to the subject.

But there's completely and utterly absolutely NO mention of it--and 
the kids do have a pretty solid load of classes as it is.  I'm not 
going to open the can of worms that is trying to work out a Hogwarts 
schedule, but I don't think there are vast areas of open time for 
them to enjoy.  There are times when it's not mentioned but it's 
actually there (pace the Charms Club and all that, only revealed in 
OotP), but here is one place where I'm going to stick to the 'It's 
not mentioned because it really isn't there' line of thought.

There are some entertaining nods to wizarding literature in the 
schoolbooks, but I think (and I'd love to ask on this) that the lack 
of music, art, literature, philosophy--basically, ANY humanities 
class--is thematic for wizarding society.

Hogwarts is a school where you go to learn magic.  The classes are 
overwhelmingly practical--how to make potions, how to take care of 
plants, how to transfigure things, what are Dark Creatures--with 
maybe a smattering of thinking about what all of this means thrown 
in, and it's very more than disturbing that most of that came from 
Crouch!moody.  The kids learn how to write essays, as I can't see 
either Snape or McGonagall accepting things with lots of grammatical 
errors, but the work we've seen them doing so far seems largely of 
the book-report caliber.

Wizards don't generally do well at logic (with the exception of 
people like Hermione, not raised in the culture, and the ever 
enigmatic Snape).  They also don't seem, then, to have a terribly 
lively tradition of critical thinking.  This seems to me clearly 
related to the problem above, because of this: They have magic.  They 
are special and different from Muggles who don't, and they 
consequently generally see little of value to be gained in thinking 
about or like Muggles--Dumbledore is a grand exception.

I've long nursed the hypothesis, way, way back in the archives (and I 
don't remember the post numbers) that it's slightly telling that 
Dumbledore and Flamel are both fans of a Muggle art form, classical 
music.  Chamber music for Dumbledore (the stuff of the truly 
discerning, traditionally) and opera for Flamel (the urban art-form 
extraordinare and something wizards really couldn't have developed as 
one of their own artistic traditions).  Magic is the kind of thing 
that helps stifle artistic creation, because it can perfectly modify 
reality, and produce perfect replicas.  When you have wizarding 
portraits that move and talk (the highest possible versimilitude), 
why bother with developing things like Impressionism or abstract 
painting?

(I think that the creative analyst can also link this to the general 
observation that wizarding society is not an urbanized one.  There is 
one all-wizarding village in Great Britain.  There are commercial and 
social centers, but then people live out in the countryside, as you 
can *do* that when you have magical transportation.  Very nice in 
some ways, but it means they as a society, splitting when they did, 
never had to deal with many of the things that the urbanized European 
societies had to develop as a result of trying to figure out how to 
live in cities.  Political theory is one BIG one.  A number of very 
lovely developments in the arts also go along explicitly with 
urbanization.)

Maybe there is a wide and flourishing tradition of wizarding 
literature--there are certainly books, of course.  There is no 
evidence of the classroom presence of reading literature in order to 
read literature, though; reading through a book as a class to discuss 
meaning, interpretation, all of that jazz, this seems to just not be 
there.  And the kids and the entire WW are intellectually 
impoverished from it.

> If you're a wizard professor, with a life expectancy of 150+ years, 
> you have the time to be trained beyond the core curriculum you want 
> to teach, which would allow the education system to be much more 
> interdisciplinary.

We also know (per interview) that there are not wizarding 
universities, and this is backed up in canon by Hermione in OotP.  If 
there were university as a future educational option, *surely* she 
would have mentioned it.  Fanfiction writers have postulated huge and 
intricate networks of learning (which somehow even manage to publish 
journals despite lacking the necessary graduate student slave labor 
and any defined mechanism for peer review), but I suspect the 
actuality behind it, in JKR's conception, is much less intricate.  
Maybe there's some Master/Apprentice structure, but we have no 
information about this, really.  But there are no universities.

-Nora notes that a few comments could completely destroy this entire 
theory, but would love some more information yea or nay on whether 
it's on to something or not