11 Magical Schools

[oryx_leucoryx]

The recent Pottermore blurb about Durmstrang says, "Durmstrang once had the darkest reputation of all eleven wizarding schools, though this was never entirely merited." IOW there are 11 wizarding schools worldwide. I find this number surprisingly small, considering that the magical population served by Hogwarts comes from a population of roughly 64 million (UK) plus 4.7 million (Ireland) totaling some 69 million, out of a global population of about 7 billion, so just under 1%. I was expecting there to be several dozens of schools, not fewer than one dozen. (Yes, we only knew about 2 other schools in Europe, but surely those were merely the oldest ones, and additional schools could have been founded over the centuries?)

So how do we reconcile these?

If the proportion of magical to non-magical people in the UK is typical, then one possibility is that other schools have about 10 times the student body of Hogwarts, supporting the impression some readers here have of Hogwarts as a magical backwater.

Alternatively, it is possible that some parts of the world do not use wizarding schools as the way to pass on magical education. It is possible that some areas rely on home-education, private tutors serving improvised small groups of children, or apprenticeships with locally famous wizards. Perhaps some traditional societies still have magical folk living openly within the local non-magical community, with no requirement for separate education, just specific training in magic with a local adult wizard on top of whatever education is typically available in that community.

Or perhaps the UK and Ireland have an exceptionally high proportion of magical folk, and there really aren't all that many wizards in the world. Or other wizarding communities don't make an effort to include every magical child in their educational system as Hogwarts does with the quill. We are told (by Draco) that Durmstrang doesn't educate Muggleborns. Perhaps anyone who doesn't have parents that know about the magical school or whose parents don't make an effort to get their child into the magical school doesn't learn there. Not only Muggleborns, but also orphans like Tom Riddle (or only orphaned of their magical parent, like Dean), children of parents who didn't like the school or disagree with how it is run, children of neglectful parents, children of parents who lack the means to provide transportation, and so forth. In this case, there may be many undiscovered wizards within non-magical society, while the magical society outside of the UK and Ireland would be significantly more inbred.

What is your preferred scenario?

Also, where do you think these schools should be located?

In this blog post Andrew claims:

However, Goblet of Fire does also briefly mention an unnamed Brazilian wizarding school, where Bill Weasley once had a pen pal. In Wonderbook: Book of Potions, which also includes new content written by J.K. Rowling (as both Book of Spells and Book of Potions were created through an extension of Sony’s “Pottermore partnership” with Rowling), we also learn of a wizarding school in Japan named the “Mahoutokoro School of Magic” (see the Harry Potter Wikia), as well as one in Russia and another in South Africa, the names of which I was not quite able to catch while playing this game.

If we accept the details then the Russian school may be a 4th European school, or it may be somewhere in Siberia. IMO there should be more Asian schools, maybe in Tibet or Nepal, serving wizards from China, India and other parts of eastern and southern Asia. Then there should be a school serving wizards from the Middle East and northern Africa, perhaps with connections to the alchemy center in Alexandria. No Quidditch in this school, but they may race flying carpets. Probably 2 schools in the Americas?

Any thoughts?

Comments

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

That is a valid point. Yet nobody appears to be noticing that if the number of students declines (and that really sounds like a 50% drop at least), clearly the population is also going to decline -- unless they expect to get a lot of adult immigrants from other nations.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Even if we follow the idea that cohort sizes vary a lot, and the drop was a response to the sudden escalation in the war, British wizards are still in trouble - that's at least 2 years and 10 months of a severely reduced birthrate. Under this model it seems Wizarding Britain lost more of its population through lack of births than through violent deaths.

France, as an example of a country that was not growing much in the preceding years, experienced a halving of the crude birth rate during the first World War and it took the French some 10-11 years to return to pre-war population size. (I think France is a reasonable model because the little we see from wizarding families indicates that in the 1950s to 1970s family size was generally small.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Yup. People deciding not to have kids in an unstable political situation will reduce a population *much* more effectively than a small band of maniacs running around and killing people.

And makes a bit of sense that upon arrival at Hogwarts, Harry noticed that "there were an awful lot of muggle-borns".

Yet we don't get an impression that starting around Harry's year 3 the annual intake of new students was suddenly increasing -- which it ought to have, starting right around then. Ginny's year might still be small because of the September 1 cut-off date. The post-war celebration births would have only started showing up around July (she was born in August). Most of the potential "baby" boom would have been in the year following.

[dorea-ysleen.livejournal.com]

Just a slight nitpick - the "celebration births" wouldn't have started until the year AFTER Ginny's birth: she was born in August 1981, Voldemort was vanquished on Halloween 1981, so the baby boom shouldn't have started before July/August 1982, noticebly affecting the Hogwarts student body only from Sept. 1994 (Harry's fourth year) onward. Not that there was any hint of that, either.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Duh. Right.

Starting (slowly) with Harry's year 3, then and descending in force with year 4.

And a Tournament disrupting things on top of everything! Who the hell thought *that* was a good idea? Can't they count?

[dorea-ysleen.livejournal.com]

Apparently not. Guess all the arithmancers found greener pastures... :-)

[oryx_leucoryx]

And those many new students were in 4th year in DH, just old enough to consider themselves suited to fight in the battle (they were the same age Ginny and Luna were when they fought at the Ministry) - yet completely unprepared. I'm guessing they made a significant contribution to the 50 who died.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Well, Minerva chivvyed everyone out who was under age, but we don't know they all went. Ginny came back for the battle, so she flew in under the radar, since she was still underage by 3+ months. Luna and Colin may have both been of age by that time, as were a large percentage of the 6th year, but no one 5th year or under.

[sunnyskywalker]

Maybe when they said they wanted to promote international cooperation, they actually meant matchmaking? Showing off to the foreign students and have a largish group of them living there long enough to form attachments to Hogwarts students in hopes of bringing in a few future brides and grooms? It seems to have worked in Fleur Delacour's case. Krum invited Hermione to Bulgaria, which is the wrong way about, but given how impressed the Durmstrang students were with the gold plates and lack of forced rowing at Hogwarts maybe it would have ended with him moving to Britain if the relationship had worked out.

If it hadn't been for Cedric dying, who knows? Maybe a few students would have wanted to transfer to Hogwarts because they'd made friends and it seemed cool and the whole Voldemort thing had blown over ages ago so their parents might think it was safe enough. But student deaths tend to put a damper on plans like that, regardless of the cause.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Think of it further:

Back then the student body was larger and there were at some point more teachers (in the late 1950s Albus and Minerva taught together in the Transfiguration department, according to Pottermore). Did the reduction in staff numbers under Albus follow the drop in student numbers or preceded it? In any case, if there was a post-war baby-boom in the 1980s, we don't see any effort to accommodate by hiring more staff. Starting from GOF the staff would be stretched out worse than before, first the teachers of core subjects, and starting from HBP the teachers of the electives too.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Ah. Finally something from Pottermore that doesn't make a pig's breakfast of everything we've seen in the books.

The potential for a staff reduction wouldn't have happened until about 1980, from what we can see squinting around the edges of the text. Even though Rowling may not have *meant* anything by it, Albus's comment in chapter 1, book 1, that "there's been little to celebrate for 11 years" rather solidly pins the probable date that wizarding society as a whole became both aware of Lord Voldemort, and afraid to speak his nom-de-guerre.

Still that would indicate a decade of falling student numbers before Harry's cohort (presumably the smallest one in the whole 20th century) showed up.

We don't know how much the Ministry meddles with the Hogwarts budget, if at all, but it is possible that the Board of Governors insisted on those reductions as the student body declined. We know Albus was willing to discard Divination from the curriculum, but eliminating a study that most students are not actually qualified to practice professionally isn't exactly sabotaging anything.

[sunnyskywalker]

You bringing up immigration makes me wonder how much international migration actually occurs in the Potterverse. Do purebloods marry foreign purebloods in preference to local less-than-purebloods? How often? We don't seem to see much of this in the family histories we get for some reason. Draco says his father almost sent him to Durmstrang, but we never hear about anyone from Hogwarts actually transferring, or mentioning a friend who went abroad for school instead of Hogwarts. Fleur Delacour seems like one of the only people ever to actually move to another country (Ludovic Bagman's name is suggestive of him or his parents having immigrated, and maybe Dolohov). Bill and Charlie, though Bill moves back home after a few years, and doesn't seem to have become a citizen of magical Egypt so maybe it was more a long-term assignment overseas. Really we don't see enough to draw any firm conclusions, I think.

Maybe the drop in population isn't so much due to a decrease in births but to British wizards moving to Canada and Australia in droves during Voldemort's peak years? And the remaining British wizards think a lot of them will be coming back eventually?

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Always possible. But then it's been a decade since Voldemort was supposedly defeated and everything is back to business as usual. If they were going to come back, you'd have expected them to do it already.

[sunnyskywalker]

Well, yes, but that's because we have common sense. Wizards might still be going, "Oh, they didn't ever intend to move permanently, so I'm sure they just need a little more time to get their affairs in order. After all we're by far the best, so why wouldn't they come back?" (And meanwhile the expats are going, wait, this Canadian school seems to have... standards? Maybe we'd better stay, for the children...)

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Right!