I don’t think Hogwarts is supposed to be the only wizarding school in Magical Britain. It’s referred to on a number of occasions as the “best”, never the “only”.
Hogwarts does seem to have some fairly incompetent students, but HP canon makes it pretty clear that the wizarding population has plenty of incompetent adults, so there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Less capable students (such as Crabbe and Neville) probably get in due to family connections, while muggle born students may have some sort of affirmative action initiative going on for them (think how disadvantaged they already are, having no family at all in the world they’re going to inhabit, on top of discrimination from the higher classes.)
Since Hogwarts is the premier school of Magical Britain, it’s not surprising if the most important and/or successful individuals in Magical Britain were mostly educated there, but we do not know that more than a small fraction of all the various wizarding adults who appear in the series outside the school were educated there. It also makes sense if the administration of Hogwarts is taken particularly seriously by the government, since field and government leaders disproportionately graduate there.
I’ve always figured canon Magical Britain to have a population of perhaps 3-600,000 (although I believe Harry speculates a smaller number in HPMoR.) I also figured that they have a disproportionate amount of the population in government positions because governing the wizarding world is much more complicated than governing a similar population of muggles. Magic provides each trained wizard with far more varied and creative ways to cause trouble than an ordinary muggle (imagine if every person in a First World country had access to a set of fully equipped and funded university laboratories, with at least basic understanding of how to use them. Even the least dangerously creative individuals would have access to poison and explosives. Wizards are more troublesome than that.) They also have to manage all sorts of magical creatures (dragons, manticores, etc.,) which as Hagrid proves can even be cross bred in danerous and unpredictable ways. And they’re sitting on top of a bunch of weird and potentially dangerous mysteries which the regular population can’t be trusted with (the Death Portal, research of time magic, prophesies, and so on.) And to top it all off, they have to keep all of this secret from the muggle population. A governing body in the same relative proportion to the population as we have in the muggle world couldn’t possibly manage all of that.
Quirrel and Harry are clearly both outliers in the Wizarding World with respect to intelligence, but considering the outlets that every individual in the wizarding world has at their disposal, it wouldn’t be surprising if their culture and education tended to develop more creative and original thinkers.
I also only just noticed that the comment I’m replying to was posted two years ago yesterday, not yesterday.
I don’t think Hogwarts is supposed to be the only wizarding school in Magical Britain. It’s referred to on a number of occasions as the “best”, never the “only”.
Hogwarts does seem to have some fairly incompetent students, but HP canon makes it pretty clear that the wizarding population has plenty of incompetent adults, so there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Less capable students (such as Crabbe and Neville) probably get in due to family connections, while muggle born students may have some sort of affirmative action initiative going on for them (think how disadvantaged they already are, having no family at all in the world they’re going to inhabit, on top of discrimination from the higher classes.)
Since Hogwarts is the premier school of Magical Britain, it’s not surprising if the most important and/or successful individuals in Magical Britain were mostly educated there, but we do not know that more than a small fraction of all the various wizarding adults who appear in the series outside the school were educated there. It also makes sense if the administration of Hogwarts is taken particularly seriously by the government, since field and government leaders disproportionately graduate there.
I’ve always figured canon Magical Britain to have a population of perhaps 3-600,000 (although I believe Harry speculates a smaller number in HPMoR.) I also figured that they have a disproportionate amount of the population in government positions because governing the wizarding world is much more complicated than governing a similar population of muggles. Magic provides each trained wizard with far more varied and creative ways to cause trouble than an ordinary muggle (imagine if every person in a First World country had access to a set of fully equipped and funded university laboratories, with at least basic understanding of how to use them. Even the least dangerously creative individuals would have access to poison and explosives. Wizards are more troublesome than that.) They also have to manage all sorts of magical creatures (dragons, manticores, etc.,) which as Hagrid proves can even be cross bred in danerous and unpredictable ways. And they’re sitting on top of a bunch of weird and potentially dangerous mysteries which the regular population can’t be trusted with (the Death Portal, research of time magic, prophesies, and so on.) And to top it all off, they have to keep all of this secret from the muggle population. A governing body in the same relative proportion to the population as we have in the muggle world couldn’t possibly manage all of that.
Quirrel and Harry are clearly both outliers in the Wizarding World with respect to intelligence, but considering the outlets that every individual in the wizarding world has at their disposal, it wouldn’t be surprising if their culture and education tended to develop more creative and original thinkers.
I also only just noticed that the comment I’m replying to was posted two years ago yesterday, not yesterday.
Were you maybe looking for this?
I linkhopped from there, and then left the computer and forgot that what I had open was a past discussion.