Wizarding population and education outside Hogwarts

[sunnyskywalker]

I'm trying to piece together some muddled thoughts about wizarding population and society. This comes in two parts: concerning the population of wizarding Britain and Hogwarts, and concerning whether we can find wiggle room for non-Hogwarts educational options.

Fair warning: I'm probably better at math than Rowling, but that is a low bar. (At least one and probably all of her population estimates are probably wrong.) Corrections and better ideas welcome!



Wizarding Population: Oh Dear Maths

Rowling has thrown out various and contradictory population numbers for the wizarding world over the years. First she said Hogwarts had about 1,000 students. Then she lowered this to 600. She’s also said that the wizarding population of the British Isles is around 3,000.

I’m sure anyone can spot a few problems here without breaking a sweat.

First, we would also have to imagine that either Harry has failed to notice between 45 and 100 extra students in his year, or he has failed to notice that his year is 45 to 100 students smaller than average. I sincerely doubt that the war caused so many emigrations, deaths, and delayed childbearings that his year could be that much smaller. And even Harry couldn’t be oblivious enough to notice either of those scenarios. Could he?

Even if he could, though, there’s a bigger problem: Hogwarts has only one teacher per subject. Even assuming wizards are significantly tougher and need less sleep than we mere Muggles, there is just no way in hell that McGonagall is teaching Transfiguration to 1,000 students, never mind doing that and serving as Head of Gryffindor House and Deputy Headmistress. Teaching 600 isn’t much more plausible. We can’t assume big lecture hall scenarios for years other than Harry’s, either. As far as we know, there are no big lecture halls in Hogwarts. And a lot of their classes require practical work, not just lectures. Can anyone honestly see Snape supervising 60 or 100 kids trying to brew potentially-explosive potions at once? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But we can’t assume that each year is split into four or five sections either. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to teach them even if you assume no homework to grade! I don’t think even rampant Time-Turner abuse could make that work.

So, it seems much more likely that Hogwarts has no more than about 300 students, with seventh years acting as teaching assistants to reduce the teachers’ workload to still-crushing but at least vaguely possible levels. The extra “hundreds” of people in the crowds wearing Slytherin green alone at Quidditch games can be explained as players’ relatives and Hogsmeade residents come to see the game. The hundred-ish students Harry sees taking an OWL in Snape's memory can be a combination of (a) Harry overestimating the crowd a bit and (b) NEWT students using the same space for their exam at the same time.

So that’s all right. And it looks like in Muggle Britain, the population cohort aged 10-19 is currently about 11% of the population, so having 300 kids aged 11-18 out of a total population of 3,000 sounds plausible too. Well, except that wizards are supposed to live longer than Muggles on average, so kids ought to form a smaller percentage of the population, but Rowling fails to show this age distribution for the most part anyway, so you can explain that away as wizards being able to live longer but rarely actually doing so. Probably because they all blow themselves up in ridiculous accidents.

Except, a total population of 3,000? When Mrs. Weasley goes looking for Fred and George’s shop, the street number is in the upper 90s, and it isn’t even near the end of the street. Are there 150 shops in Diagon Alley? 200? How many in Knockturn Alley and Hogsmeade? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state of California has (rounding for convenience) nearly 3,550,000 firms for a population of nearly 40 million, or about 1 firm per 11 people. (Again, rounding.) That ratio—which we can’t necessarily assume would be the same, but let’s for the sake of argument—would argue for about 272 total businesses in a wizarding world of 3,000. So… sure, maybe Diagon Alley has 130 shops, and Knockturn and Hogsmeade have another 140 between them. It could work.

But it’s much harder to explain the Ministry assigning 500 employees to preparing for the Quidditch World Cup full time for a year. To keep the entire government from grinding to a halt, we have to assume that isn’t the entire Ministry workforce, or even close to it, yes? Let’s be generous to the poor employees left behind to cover the regular work and say there’s another 500 of them. Cutting half your workforce for a year is ridiculous, but hey, governments have done far more ridiculous things.

But that would mean that literally a third of the entire population is government employees. That is a hell of a lot. Taking California as an example again, because it has a large and complex bureaucracy, the State Controller’s Office says that there are a total of 233,044 active employees—including part time and intermittent employees. Out of a population of nearly 40 million, that makes for under 0.6% of the population on the state payroll. (I’m ignoring local and federal government employees because the wizarding world only seems to have one level of government. If they have local governments for Hogsmeade and the Alleys, they’re likely to be so tiny as not to alter the final tallies much.) There is a huge gulf between 0.6% and 33% which isn’t easy to explain even if the wizarding economy and society are structured far more differently from California’s than one would think. Just how many Obliviators do they have on staff? How many useless sinecures? How do they pay all these people?

I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of 1,000 people working for the government, 300-500 running or working in businesses, 600 in school, and the final 1,000-ish being either young children, retirees, or homemakers. And, oh yeah, having an entire modern “nation” of only 3,000 people to begin with.

And weren’t there supposed to be about 100,000 people at the Quidditch World Cup? Unless Britain has a far smaller magical population relative to non-magical than anywhere else, that would have to mean that something like a third of the entire wizarding population of the world attended a single sports game. I know they’re starved for culture and this is one of their only entertainments, but come on.

Now, wizarding Britain can’t be vastly larger than 3,000 people. It’s still tiny by Muggle standards. You could probably argue for as high as 30,000, but somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 seems more likely based on what we see. Which would make around 600 people of Hogwarts age sound just about plausible if you also assume a greater number of elderly than in Muggle society.

Except there can’t be 600 students at Hogwarts, as we established. So where are they hiding the extra kids?

Alternative Education

Rowling has also claimed that Hogwarts is the only school of magic in Britain, and Harry probably would have noticed if the Hogwarts Quidditch teams were frequently playing against another school. So fine, no other British schools of magic.

But one of my schools had an annual sophistry contest, which turns out to have its advantages. Let’s split some hairs. What exactly do you mean by “a school”?

Suppose a reasonably skilled witch or wizard (or one who claims to be) hangs out a shingle as a magical educator. Students meet in the teacher’s house, or a magical pub, or a convenient field or rented storefront, and stay as long as they can pay. Maybe the teacher has a partner to help with the admin work, or there are two or three teachers who come and go as their life circumstances dictate. They teach what they think is useful and what their customers want. There’s no fixed institutional structure, no permanent address, and no expectation that it will continue indefinitely. Is this “a school”? Maybe not. Certainly not according to Hogwarts, a History.

(Incidentally, I imagine this is about how Hogwarts started out, which is why the Sorting Hat can’t give a specific date for the school’s founding. When did it transition from being four skilled magic-workers passing on knowledge to some favored disciples in an informal fashion to being an institution? If it was a gradual process, who can say?)

You can see why some families might prefer this arrangement. Not all wizards have stacks of gold in their family vaults, or belong to the civil servant class and are willing to sacrifice the possibility of their children contributing to the family economy in hopes that Hogwarts attendance will give them greater opportunities. Some probably depend on their kids getting jobs when they’re fourteen or fifteen to keep the family afloat. Or younger, even. Such families might send their kids to Hogwarts for a couple of years, even through OWLs—but then again, it might be even more convenient if the kids could live at home, attend lessons in the morning, and work in the afternoons. Or look after their younger siblings and cook dinner so their parents can work.

Then there’s the tradition of apprenticeship. If your family have been members of the Worshipful Company of Broomwrights for centuries, and they expect you to take up the family business—or your family have been sweeping the floor for the broomwrights and have finally gotten you an apprenticeship so you can move up in the world—do they want you to spend seven years learning to make pineapples tap-dance before you start learning your craft? Can they even afford to lose your labor for seven years? Maybe. But maybe not. Such families might want their children to focus on useful, practical spells related to their craft and daily life: broom- or wand-making or whatever, summoning objects, cleaning, cooking. Who has time to waste learning to turn rats into water goblets?

And of course there are always people who have different educational needs or priorities. We’re led to believe that if Dumbledore hadn’t made special arrangements for Lupin, then Lupin would have been home-schooled. No doubt there are other kids who are chronically ill or have some other reason (including exceptionally controlling parents) they can’t attend boarding school. Others might be deeply religious, or belong to different magical traditions, and their parents want their educations to emphasize those aspects. Maybe some of those small not-school tutoring groups are religious, or teach in the Irish bardic tradition.

If a fair number of children use these alternate arrangements instead of attending Hogwarts (or at least, instead of staying in Hogwarts more than a couple of years), that would also provide a larger market for those Kwikspell correspondence courses.

How do these children become qualified witches and wizards without taking OWLs, if they do?

There might be an alternate testing track. Apprentices might qualify by graduating to journeyman level, or that plus passing a test of some general basic skills. Attendees of the not-technically-schools and homeschool students might have a more extensive basic skills test. There might even be intermediate levels of qualification, like “qualified to perform spells related to one’s trade on business premises and use magic at home, but not in the street except in emergencies.”

The books do seem to show a strong national tradition of Hogwarts attendance—but then again, most of the adults Harry meets who talk about their Hogwarts days or mention a House affiliation are teachers, civil servants, and/or rich. We don’t see many—or any?—wizarding-raised, working-class kids at Hogwarts. (Snape as a literal half-blood is the closest, but we don’t know his mother’s class background. Whatever it was, she probably had, ahem, ambitions for his future. You’d better be in Slytherin!) So if there were a couple hundred kids not at Hogwarts, or if whoever manufactured Harry’s cauldron didn’t go to Hogwarts, how would Harry know?

So while it’s not required that there be a substantial non-Hogwarts-attending population, it’s at least possible. All that’s required is that the Hogwarts set be culturally and socially dominant. Which, if the non-Hogwarts (and early-Hogwarts-leavers) set is mostly working-class with a few artisans and religious minorities, they would be.

So, if you want, you can have a total wizarding population of 9,500, a Hogwarts population of 300, and a couple hundred more kids of Hogwarts-age kids apprenticing and/or attending regular, trade, and bardic not-technically-schools. If you’re really good, you could probably even make a population of 15,000 and several hundred more non-Hogwarts kids work, though that sounds more difficult. But why should difficulty stop a dedicated theorist or fanficcer?

There are probably even more possibilities for, er, massaging Rowling’s numbers into something plausible and dramatically satisfying. I’d love to hear them!

Comments

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

First, I don't think that, within-world, Harry notices other students. He keeps to his close friends and doesn't seem to be looking outward to make other friends. He keeps his head and eyes down. I think the largest population he would see would be in the dining hall where all students eat. I haven't read the books in a while and I may be conflating movie scenes with the books, but I got the impression there were a good many students.

Speaking of the dining hall, there is a staff table, but again IIRC, Harry doesn't give a number of teachers up there. Each cohort in the school might have a different set of teachers, who then oversee one, two, or possibly three cohorts (for instance, 1st, 3rd and 5th years). If I'm right that Harry is more withdrawn, he wouldn't be concerned with students not in his immediate cohort.

I like your idea of alternative education for WW students who don't attend Hogwarts. A trade education might be more practical, as you said, for working-class students. This would still allow for students like Tom Riddle and Lily Evans to attend since they don't have parents or guardians who know about these alternatives. Students like them may be the reason Hogwarts has a fund for underprivileged students, actively discouraging WW-born and raised students from using the fund. Hogwarts staff may even discourage working-class students from attending, pointing them toward the alternatives.

On the total population in Britain, I have to ask if this also includes the Republic of Ireland. I don't know if in the past it would have, or if the WW follows Muggle national boundaries as they change over time. I'm assuming that Rowling meant GB and NI, but within-world, which countries does 'Britain' encompass? If Britain means England, Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, and Cornwall, then would students from other nearby nations such as Ireland be allowed to enroll? What criteria would influence this?

On the ministry dedicating 500 employees to the World Cup, maybe they hired on temporary staff to either take care of the games or to take on the lower-level jobs that were vacated due to this special assignment.

From having read, I got the impression that the WW was larger than the numbers Rowling put out. I have a hard time imagining that a total population of 3,000, with a third of those people still in school, would have a hospital as medically diverse as St. Mungo's for a start.

Interesting discussion. I hope to see more speculation. :D

[oryx_leucoryx]

The British Minister of Magic receives the Quidditch World Cup when Ireland wins, so it looks like Ireland falls under his jurisdiction.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

In her fanfic “The Best Revenge,” Arsinoë de Blassenville has Charity Burbage explain to Harry that wizarding Britain and Ireland are united only with regard to quidditch, for obscure historical and bureaucratic reasons that are far too complicated to explain. Fanon not canon, I know, but I prefer it to the idea that there is no wizarding Republic of Eire.

My headcanon is that Ireland (the island, not the Republic), historically had a large number of small schools, not one big boarding school like in Britain. Along with the eight or ten schools in Eire, two of the small schools are still alive and well in Northern Ireland; one Catholic and one Protestant, of course. Irish parents have the option to send their children to Hogwarts, which has a world-wide reputation (probably over-inflated), though the students not from the North have to pay extra tuition, since their parents don’t pay taxes to the UK Ministry of Magic.

[sunnyskywalker]

I think the multiple small schools in Ireland (the island) fits with what little I know of medieval Irish education, too, so it would be a plausible extrapolation that the general system (and one or two schools) survived. And out-of-state tuition for Hogwarts sounds likely! That income might be earmarked for the student hardship assistance fund, in fact.

[sunnyskywalker]

You know, if wizarding-born working class kids are more likely to end up in one of the trade education options while Muggle-borns automatically go to Hogwarts because they have no connections which would allow them to do otherwise, that's probably one of the talking points pureblood supremacists use: here good pureblood kids are shunted into low-paying jobs while these interlopers get a posh education and probably end up working for the Ministry! (Not in the top positions of course, but they would gloss over that bit.) Now I'm imagining wizarding talk radio.

Having a second set of teachers who have alternate year-cohorts would help with the staffing problem, and with why there's occasional mention of "the Transfiguration Department" (it sounds funny if it's a department of one!), but there's a point where my suspension of disbelief breaks. Could even Harry go six entire years without noticing that there's an entire second set of teachers? Or rather, is it possible that these teachers would be so utterly irrelevant that Harry would never once have occasion to think about them in the narrative in all that time? If there were a second Potions teacher, for instance, he'd probably spend a lot of time wishing he could be in that class instead, or that Snape would get sick and the other teacher would sub for a few days and give them a break, or things along that line. Or he and Ron would gripe about how other departments have second teachers, and it must be that they can't get one for Potions because no one wants to work with that awful Snape.

I like the idea for its logic, though. I'm sure someone could make it work with some deft maneuvering.

They talk about "Ireland" in the QWC and Fudge acts for them, as Oryx mentioned, but they could be speaking loosely. So it's hard to say. I think it's more than likely that wizarding political boundaries don't entirely match ours, so there's probably a lot of room to arrange things in any number of ways.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Harry would probably notice the second set of teachers, or at least the second Potions teacher, if only to wish he was in the other class instead of Snape's.

On WW political boundaries, I thought about the history in that part of the world and wondered about how far back the current boundaries extend - I don't think they'd go back to the Norman conquest, but where would the WW draw the timeline at boundary changes? Would it be when the Statute of Secrecy was implemented? Would that only cover Britain, or did the worldwide WW adopt the statute at or about the same time? Did the German WW break into East and West after Grindlewald/WWII? Was there a Wizarding Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?

[sunnyskywalker]

Or would there be a cutoff point for boundaries at all? I could see them hanging onto some very old ones and adopting some of the newer ones when they feel like it or there's another compelling reason (since they don't entirely escape influence from Muggle culture and events, obviously). And maybe forming a few of their own political entities too. For all we know, they have a France which mostly matches ours and the Holy Roman Empire next door (but one whose boundaries and components have changed since when we last had an HRE). It could be a tangled mish-mash. I wonder if they still have the Papal States, and whether they have a Wizard Anti-Pope or the same pope as us.

I also wonder about multi-jurisdiction regions. Iirc, this used to be a thing in Muggle history: you might have neighbors who were treated under different sets of laws based on their "nation"/ethnicity/whatever. Like, you follow Goth laws and I follow Roman laws, or something like that. (Er, any classicists who can weigh in here?) Since geography is so much less relevant to people who can travel through fireplaces and teleport, in theory it should be possible to have neighbors who are citizens of different magical nations. Maybe the US Southwest is both Mexican and USian territory simultaneously, with citizens not living in any pattern which would allow a division of territory with a continuous border.

I can only imagine what Alaska must be like if this is possible! You could potentially have Haida, Tlingit, Russian, Canadian, USian, and who knows what other governments operating more or less in the same areas. And even if most of them live in all-wizarding villages divided by "nation" (albeit possibly located so that again, you can't easily draw sensible lines on a map to delineate the borders), some people must move to areas with larger populations. There could be an apartment building in Juneau where every apartment has people subject to a different government from their neighbors. Imagine what a nightmare it would be if one of them stole another's record player!

Maybe they have a USSR, but it is a house-elf soviet republic ;-)

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

A single building with multiple jurisdictions would be a complete nightmare, not just with stealing, but with other neighbor-type crimes like noise abatement or what is and isn't offensive. Now I'm wondering how homogenous the WW's various 'nations'/jurisdictions are with each other. I'm guessing they all have either the identical Statute of Secrecy or similar statutes, but what about other laws? Despite the talking-point differences that we've seen in the books, are witches and wizards more alike than Muggle divisions?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Although there is an International Statute of Secrecy, it is possible that outside of Europe magical/non-magical boundaries are more porous and in some places there aren't any at all (or at least weren't any until European colonialists showed up).

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

That reminds me that 'international' could just mean two countries. Maybe not every country signed up.

[sunnyskywalker]

I expect this is true. Probably lots of indigenous peoples ignore Secrecy and live in integrated societies. Muggle outsiders probably interpret anything they chance to see as "some kind of local religious practice." (Which might also be true. Just because the British wizards we see treat magic from a secular perspective doesn't mean they all do.)

This would work better for rural, isolated communities. The Alaskan Obliviators are probably too busy dealing with those damn kids causing trouble in Anchorage again to bother with a little village of 150 people up north who all know about magic but don't tell outsiders, e.g. The situation might be different for those who have moved to cities.

And I think Terri once mentioned the possibility of Scottish magicals claiming their entire clans as family entitled to be in on the secret; this argument could be used by other societies with clan structures too.

[sunnyskywalker]

I have been wondering whether the rich old pureblood families ever go spouse-shopping abroad for their kids. I don't think we see much sign of this on the partial family trees we have, but you would think they would, given how few of them there are in any given country. Maybe that's one reason the Malfoys considered sending Draco to Durmstrang?

If there is an international marriage market, that might lead to more similarities between countries than we might otherwise expect (or at least within which already have some cultural similarities to start, like Western Europe or the Mediterranean). But like I said, I don't think we see much or any evidence of this. Apart from maybe the inclusion of Shafiq family in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. But they might have just moved as a family to Britain and then married into the community rather than specifically spouse-shopping and sending their son off to that rainy island. Some French-named families might have arrived more recently than the Norman Conquest. Or might have had branches of the family on both sides of the Channel, so that a Lestrange could be either from the long-established British Lestranges or a relocated French Lestrange, and we might not know.

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

If we accept JKR statement about how the pen wants to write names in the book to attend Hogwarts, but the book doesn't let it. With some students take multiple tries with out bursts of magic to get in. We could have a sizeable number of "low-level" magic users who don't go to Hogwarts. Instead the are home schooled, apprenticed into jobs that don't require Hogwarts level magic.

[sunnyskywalker]

That might work!