We definately see the body. Even Harry comments about the look on Dumbledore’s face and pulls the locket out of the pocket.
Alright, so I got them mixed up - but I read the thread title and thought it was about Col. Sherman T. Potter.
StG
Here’s a video of a recent stage event thingy she did with John Irving and Steven King. And because i’m sure you won’t want to slug through it all (though I suggest you do; it’s pretty interesting), the question in particular is at around 1 hour 43 minutes into the video, and here’s a transcript of the relevant part of the Q+A session (hosted on the former dumbledoreisnotdead.com);
What on earth happened there? I just did a cut and paste…it’s pasting all backwards. Not my fault! Here’s a corrected version.
SNERK.
You forget that a tosspot frequently will stagger when he tries to walk.
Hey! Put down that wet trout!
That’s something I’ve complained about here before. There’s apparently one math class - arithmancy - and it’s an elective. No literature. No foreign languages. No geography. No civics. No P.E. and only one sport is played at the school. And most wizards don’t seem to seek any post-secondary education. So their education in readin’, writin’, and 'rithmetic is limited to whatever they learn from their parents as young children. The entire educational system is ridiculous. The school, to a great extent, is limited to what is needed for the plots of the stories. Granted, watching Harry in geometry class wouldn’t be very exciting, but it seems like it could at least be mentioned that he’s taking it . . .
Why does he need geometry?
Pretty much anything that we need some knowledge of maths or science for, they can do with magic. Wizards also seem quite happy to appropriate muggle tech. or to get a standard muggle item and enchant it to make it better. And as far as we know, the closest a wizard or witch comes to taking on a muggle job is through liasing with muggles in power; it’s not like they’re being held back from jobs as rocket scientists. They just don’t really need the more mundance subjects.
I dunno. Why do I need geometry? They build buildings and shit, at least. Don’t you need geometry for that? Unless there’s an architectura planica spell we haven’t heard about that creates a blueprint . . .
I guess magic does a lot of things in the Potter universe. But it does seem surprising that they reject teaching basic stuff like literature and geography, even if they have no interest at all in the natural sciences.
Well, I hardly learned anything in primary school. I could already read. I was forced to read a few boring books. Went to music class and did some community singing. So it isn’t much they miss… I agree that they really could use some exercise, though.
I guess those few wizards who need to be architects could read up on that, without too much difficulty, since they can do most of it by magic.
You didn’t learn arithmetic? You don’t think your reading and writing skills improved? I think Rowling has stated that wizards generally homeschool their young children which is presumably where they learn such skills; I guess the question would be what mechanism exists to make sure they’re all ready for Hogwarts at eleven.
It just strikes me that the average wizard would be very, very poorly educated by our usual standards. We can posit all sorts of reasons why they might not have any compelling need in their lives to know geography or any foreign languages or algebra or economics or literature, but it still seems very odd to me to imagine this entire community in which no one knows anything about any of those things.
Well, duh! How else is he supposed to build a henge? A solid grasp of geometry is essential to correctly position each megalith in proper alignment with the ecliptic coordinate system and the local ley line grid. One wrong angle, and when the vernal equinox rolls around, bang!– every single inhabitant of Orkney is suddenly a goat. This sort of thing has happened far, far too many times.
Oh, come ON! What with portable models of the solar system going for a song (plus maybe 35 Galleons) in Diagon Alley, there’s surely an easily obtained magical item that will allow any wizard with the slightest interest in building a henge to trace a perfectly usable template onto his proposed construction site.
Anyway, when my older brother was in college, he took calculus. He didn’t pass the course, but he did relate to me that when the professor wrote a problem on the board, and proceeded to demonstrate its solution, he (my brother) called the process “P.F.M.”, or Pure F***kin’ Magic. From this, I conclude that Arithmancy is Calculus.
I get the sense that wizards have for so long found muggles to be totally helpless and misinformed that when muggles now have started to develop science and understanding of the world, the wizards just haven’t realized yet. They still see the muggle way of life as quaint and bizarre and an oddity without it sinking in that they’ve made real advances. Especially given that wizards can already do everything with magic, it probably doesn’t feel very pressing to learn either.
Yeah, well, it’s probably also easier to buy pre-mixed potions, but wizards still have to learn how to do it themselves.
But they don’t need to build new houses. Did you need to build the house you live in now? Just as we get people with building experience to…uh, build, I don’t see why wizards wouldn’t hire muggles. Plus there does seem to be more passing down houses through families; wizard houses are likely to have been wizard houses for a very long time.
Literature’s a bit of a problem for wizarding people, though, i’d imagine. Any readthrough of Romeo and Juliet is going to bring on questions on why a bezoar wasn’t used at the end, Animal Farm would mean questions on whether the characters were animagus or not, and so on. Wizards really don’t seem to relate well to Muggles, so most of “our” literature is out. As for wizarding literature… there are certainly comics, biographies, and ancient tales, not to mention the actual spell/potion books themselves. Pretty book-heavy culture, really.
As for geography, they do learn it. A Hogwarts alumbi could probably tell you where to find so-and-so magic beast, or where famous battles took place. They learn it as it is relevant to them, same way it is for us. How much do you know about the geography of the U.S. as compared to Spain, for example. As for the more science-based aspects of geography education, you don’t really need to know about erosion if all it takes is a flick of the wand to put everything back again.
I imagine that much of the humanities curriculum like literature and economics could be covered in “History of Magic”. They do at least 5 years of it, and I don’t think we’re ever really told much of what goes on in the class other than that it’s really boring. Anything else would be on a strictly need-to-know practical basis. They probably learn a bit of geometry in their astronomy class in order to understand astronomical coordinates.
Also, I wonder if Malfoy really could have killed Dumbledore (or Harry). An Avada Kadavra spell takes a very powerful wizard, not merely just saying the words and pointing the wand. As “Moody” said in book 4, all the students could try Avada Kavavraing him at once and he wouldn’t get so much as a nosebleed. And Harry tried to crucio Bellatrix in book 5 but he wasn’t powerful enough.
That had less to do with power than the fact that Harry couldn’t hate her enough to torture her.
I think the Weasley place is a pretty good indication that you don’t need any architectural skill to build a wizarding house…just pound a few boards together in a vaguely house-shaped format and then enchant the whole thing so it doesn’t fall down around your ears. Need more space? Just add more boards till you have a vaguely room-addition-shaped thing, then enchant again. Easy! 
Here’s a somewhat obscure question about the HP books (though I guess there’s really no question too obscure for HP fans). Whatever happened to Harry’s grandparents? I’m listening to book 5 on tape now, and there was just a part where Sirius is talking about how after he ran away from home, he’d stay with Harry’s grandparents. Have these grandparents ever been mentioned again? I think it’s implied that Harry’s parents were fairly young when they had him, so it’s not unreasonable to think that some of his grandparents would still be alive. Maybe we can assume that Harry’s dad’s parents were killed by Voldemort, but wasn’t his mother muggle born? Maybe those parents are still alive. And maybe they had a daughter…who married a dentist…and had a bright, bushy-haired daughter…
Harry’s entire family, other than the Dursleys, is dead, which is why Harry was stuck with them.