Except that they don’t seem to learn anything about chemistry or biology. They have a botany class, and Care of Magical Creatures, and Potions, but none of those appear to teach anything about the underlying science. All appear to be extremely hands-on; there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of things like evolution, or chemical reactions, or anything else. All they learn is how to mix potions from recipes and how to transplant homocidal seedlings.
No, because we’ve seen their class schedules several times. It’s clear exactly which subjects they take in which years - in fact, their schedules are a minor plot point in the third book.
I’m not saying it doesn’t work from a story-telling perspective, just that it’s not very realistic in terms of creating a believable world. I’d way rather go to Hogwarts than a real school, don’t get me wrong. But the kids graduate without much real education.
Ah, I haven’t read the books, and didn’t realize in the books they’d revealed the actual class schedule. If they really do only study magic, then that’s kinda lame.
Arithmancy as a class would presumably be divination by numbers or perhaps like a more general [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology class. As it would be real magic I suppose it would be harder than the kind of stuff you see people doing for fun but it still couldn’t be nearly as hard as higher mathematics.
I wonder if anyone ever asks Professor Vector if she goes mountain climbing or if that kind of joke would be too esoteric for Hogwarts.
Don’t they graduate with more than enough of an education to do well at wizardly jobs? I mean, it would suck for them if they lost their magic and had to get a muggle job (even then, they might be able to get a not-horrible, non-magical job in Hogsmeade or something), but I’m assuming that for the world they’re in, they should do pretty well for themselves WRT employment.
And what a boring series of books they would be if they did contain such content.
We see not even a hundredth of what their classes are made up of. 90% of the time when curriculum is mentioned it’s for a character point or plot point, as it should be. I don’t think there’s enough information in the books to say they don’t get a rounded education.
From the name, yes, it appears to be a form of divination. But Hermione also explicitly contrasts it with her actual Divination class, which she (correctly) feels to be a bunch of mumbo jumbo. She states that divination in general (and not just what the incompetent Professor Trelawney teaches) is nonsense, citing Professor McGonagal’s general disgust with the subject - and still within the context of explicitly contrasting it with arithmancy, which she seems to feel is a real subject.
I’m not sure what that means, but it made me doubt that arithmancy is numerology, even if “-mancy” generally refers to divination.
Well, generally there’s a philosophy that education should be more than mere job-training, although this is beginning to change somewhat in the United States. Most universities require a general assortment of classes to graduate, no matter what your field: some math, some natural science, some social science, some literature, foreign languages, and so forth. (Incidentally, there’s no evidence for the existence of general higher education in the wizarding world, though there’s apparently professional training in at least some fields; auror training, for instance, lasts three years, but as I recall the implication seems to be that it’s not akin to a university degree - that it’s strictly professional training.) Secondary education is even more generalized; most of your day in high school is spent on the same subjects that everyone else studies.
Compare a Hogwarts graduate to a high school graduate. The nature of primary education is not described at all in the books, but secondary education clearly is. And during that period, the students don’t seem to study literature or composition at all - there’s no evidence that such classes are even offered at Hogwarts. Even Hermione, during Prisoner of Azkaban, doesn’t take a literature class at all in her incredibly heavy course load. Like I mentioned, mathematics seems to be an elective, which means it’s fair to assume that anything beyond basic arithmetic is not expected from young witches and wizards. I’m just saying that the basic academic classes that I took in high school mostly don’t have any sort of parallel at Hogwarts. And sure, it’s not like you couldn’t build a functioning society without literature classes; apparently algebra and anything beyond are considered specialized fields, but it’s not like most of us use even high school algebra much in our daily lives. But from what you can gather from the books, it’s still strikingly different from secondary education in the United States, and I’m guessing in most other industrialized societies as well.
We have seen their class schedules. In fact, I suspect that you could - if you looked carefully enough - determine Ron, Harry, and Hermione’s class schedules for each year. In Order of the Phoenix, for instance, we see which qualifying tests each of the three takes; there’s mention elsewhere of Harry and Ron making their class schedules (essentially at random, while Hermione agonizes over hers. :)) From what we’ve seen, we can at least figure out what subjects they’re studying in general. Even if we don’t know the specifics of what they study - and yes, perhaps their Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures classes involve theory lectures that we’ve never been privy to - we see enough to know that they’re not (with the exception of Hermione) studying math, they’re not studying literature, and they’re not studying foreign languages. At all.
I don’t buy your argument that the books would have to be boring if they even mentioned such things. I don’t read a lot of children’s literature, but from what I remember from the books I read when I was a kid, there were at least passing references to math class and book reports and so forth. I don’t remember falling asleep from boredom every time the word “trigonometry” passed my eyes (but maybe I repressed the memory due to traumatic boredom. :)) I think that for a series of books set in a school, the author didn’t come up with a very believable educational system - that, or wizards have vastly different educational theories than the rest of us. (As an aside, it also seems clear from the books that teachers aren’t expected to have any sort of degree or certification in education.)
I think you’ve got a bit of Excluded Middle on your shirt, dear. The choices are not limited to a compelling wizarding adventure and “Harry Potter and the Pre-Calculus Test of Zebulon”. And obviously I’m a fan of the books - you can probably tell, from my familiarity. That doesn’t mean that the way she describes their educational system is very believable, though.
I know Harry and Hermione went to a muggle school before Hogwarts, but it seems doubtful to me that Ron or his brothers did, and I’m sure Draco Malfoy didn’t go to a muggle school. Even so, Harry and Hermione go into Hogwarts with a pretty simple understanding of math and English- 6th grade level at best. Arithmancy may take the place of higher maths (and in reality, you can get along in the world with nothing more than basic algebra if your job doesn’t require more) and I grant you that the wizarding world has a pretty simplistic understanding of physical sciences and that magic classes are the equivalent thereof, but I’m not sure where some of these kids learned how to read the spellbooks they’re using.
Herbology, perhaps you have a point, but not Potions. For the first few years, sure, they’re mostly just following recipes. But in Book 6 (not really a spoiler), they have to devise, on their own, an antidote to a complicated compound poison, a feat which requires a great deal of theoretical potions knowledge, not just a recipe from a book (Hermione actually raises this exact point). Presumably, they’ve been learning this theory through that year and in earlier years; we just haven’t seen it. It’s possible, too, that there’s some of this theoretical background in the biological classes as well.
It seems to me that it is best to think of Hogwarts as analagous to a university rather than a high school. The institution’s role within wizarding society has far more in common with a university. There are few high school teachers in our world that command the respect and status that say, Dumbledore, Snape or McGonagall do, nor are there high schools that are such a focal point of the community as Hogwarts is. However, there are plenty of universities that are central to our society the way Hogwarts is central to magical society, and there are a number of distinguished professors in our world that have the influence that Hogwarts professors do.
We know that there are no institutions of higher wizarding learning - J.K. Rowling has said so. Hence, it isn’t so much that Hogwarts graduates are lacking in education, but rather that they are, by the time they finish their schooling, the equivalent of college graduates, although they are only of high school age.
There are other things that suggest a Hogwarts education is more similar to a college education. For instance, many students, by the end of their schooling, have begun to investigate and pioneer their own magical techniques - witness Fred and George Weasley, or James, Sirius et al. - in a similar way to muggle research students develop their own scientific investigation. Similarly, Hogwarts professors are involved in magical research in a way that is similar to college professors - see Dumbledore’s list of achievements as evidence of this.
Also, Hogwarts learning seems to involve students independently studying the theory and using classroom time for practical application. There are any number of times Harry has been set an essay on a theoretical Potions or Transfiguration topic, and he is required to do readings to complete the assignment.
As for the unevenness of Hogwarts’ curriculum, this can, in part, be explained by the difference in Wizarding culture. For instance, the lack of science classes is perfectly understandable, since our science is not only irrelevent to the students, it is directly contradictory to the world they live in. Why would they take physics and learn about the laws of thermodynamics when every single one of them can break the law of thermodynamics and does so on a regular basis? Why would they need more than a sixth grade math education when it has no practical use in their world? They don’t need it for physics, since physics doesn’t apply to them. They don’t need it for engineering or architecture, because they use magic to accomplish those tasks. Science and math aren’t taught in the wizarding world because, for the most part, they do not apply.
What the wizarding world does lack are social science and arts subjects, and the impact of this deficiency can be seen in their society. They have no economics classes, probably because wizards don’t need to understand economics; they’ve outsourced economic management to goblins. That may well explain why the wizard economy isn’t that great - most employment is created by the government, and wealth seems to exist primarily amongst the upper classes who have received it through inheritance. There is some small business, but it is on a very small scale. There are no civics classes, either, and so it is of little surprise that Wizarding government is a mess.
Hogwarts teaches history, but not geography. The wizarding world is very insular, probably a cause or an effect of the lack of geographical instruction - the wizard Great Britain seems a lot more inward-looking than the muggle Great Britain.
The one subject that they could really use is English. Considering none of them have any more than an elementary education in English, their writing skills must be pretty terrible. This, too, is perhaps borne out in wizard society; we’ve seen no wizarding literature, and most of the writing appears to take the form of technical instruction (textbooks), trash (The Daily Prophet, The Quibbler), or both (Gilderoy Lockhart’s works).
This is true for the United States, but not true for all countries, not even for all Western countries. I do not know whether British universities have general education requirements, but considering that such a broadness of education is not a part of tertiary study in Western universities, there is little reason to assume that Wizarding education should need to be similarly broad.
The books may not be boring if they mentioned math classes, but it would dilute the fantasy. Hogwarts would become a whole lot more mundane and grounded if Harry had to do trig homework in between his Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures lessons. Sure, it wouldn’t disrupt the plot, but it would change the feel of the books, and definitely for the worse.