Padfoot's Breed
Rowling never specified what breed of dog Sirius' Animagus form was, and 'a bear-like black dog' doesn't do much to narrow the field of possibilities. However, if we assume that the transformation closely reflects the wizard's personality, and perhaps reinforces it, I think I might have identified our mystery breed.
( Meet the Russian Newfoundland, also called the Moscow Water Dog. )
However, there's a difference between trying to dumb down the curriculum and trying to reduce the number of faculty. Other than Hagrid, the only opportunity he's lost to replace someone has been Binns. He hired Charity Burbage for Muggle Studies when Quirrell decided to switch to DADA. He *did* hire Trelawny -- and we have only his word that he was considering not hiring anyone. I suppose that if he couldn't find someone sufficiently useful/loyal, he might not have hired anyone. Still, he did end up hiring someone.
Also, with Binns... Dumbledore could be particularly interested in preventing citizens of the WW learn about (and from) history. It's also quite possible that Binns was, at least at first, an excuse for not hiring someone immediately -- a way around choosing someone he disliked without leaving one of the core classes untaught. With Binns teaching the class, Dumbledore has the option of bringing in a new teacher any time he likes, because no one is going to object to his forcing ghost to retire.
Of course, thanks to the revolving door of the DADA position, Dumbledore can bring in anyone he likes for a single year, anyway, as long as he doesn't care what might happen to them at the end of it. But still, keeping Binns on is at least potentially a means of delaying a hiring decision until someone Dumbledore approves of comes along (if one ever does).
Anyway: I agree about the control freak part, and the dumbing down the curriculum part. I just don't think that reducing the number of teachers particularly goes hand in hand with that. He could dumb down the curriculum while still having the same number of teachers, and have more teachers under his direct authority.
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The more people there are the harder it becomes to have complete control all of them.
You would think he would want as many people as possible to join his Order to fight Voldmort and his Deatheaters. We were told how during Voldemorts first rise to power they were badly outnumbered. Wouldn't it make sense to avoid that this time? But how many new members are there? The Weasleys, Kingsley, Hestia Jones and Tonks. Not a very big recruitment. Dumbedore may be Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards and Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. However those organizations are to big to have under his complete control.
I think Dumbledore is very smart. He needs to be careful. Don't want an elimination causing the board to kick up a fuss. He needs Muggle Studies to show he cares about muggles. Defense against the Dark Art, well he is the champion of the light and opponent of Dark Magic.
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A student-teacher ratio which is too high leads to:
*increased disciplinary problems. The more children there are, the more difficult it is for a teacher to keep an eye on all of them.
*less individualized attention to the needs of the children.
---Faster learners are forced to linger over material they've already mastered while their classmates catch up. This can lead to boredom, inattention, and disengagement from the learning process.
---Slower learners may never receive the personalized help they need to catch up to their classmates. They fall further and further behind, and may find themselves unable to master material they would otherwise be capable of due to the lack of individualized lessons.
---Students' idiosyncratic difficulties, such as Neville's fear of his own magic, may be overlooked entirely due to the distraction of having so many students to care for at once. If they are recognized as extant, the teacher may lack the time and resources to either fully comprehend the problem or to address it.
*learning being primarily passive, listening to the teacher lecture.
*students being more frequently off-task, especially low-attaining students.
All effects of class size are most pronounced among already low attaining students, .e.g. those students already exhibiting difficulties in their academic careers whether due to laziness or deeper difficulties..
When there is insufficient staff to adequately support all students, teachers have little choice but to simplify the curriculum relative to what could be covered in order to minimize the number of students left behind. Pass rates for OWLs and NEWTs say very little about how thorough the curriculum is if the tests themselves have been neutered.
Supporting the idea that there used to be a larger staff is the fact (admittedly from Pottermore) that there used to be a Transfiguration Department which both Dumbledore and McGonagall belonged to. In Harry's day it appears to be only McGonagall, a reduction of at least one.
There's also a significant difference between reducing the number of staff and cancelling a class entirely. While only a fraction of the more engaged parents and officials may pay close attention to how many teachers are available and recognize the implications, almost everyone with a passing interest in the school will notice a cancellation and wonder about the reasons. And Dumbledore hates accounting for his actions to anyone.
Even then, canon can still support an interpretation that classes have been removed. In real life, when downsizing leads to the dismissal of teachers and classes, the first to go are almost always the art and music classes. Which Hogwarts lacks entirely. It doesn't even teach basic grammar and writing skills, let alone literature.
(Also, why would Dumbledore lie about discontinuing Divination? What does he gain from that?)
And of course, everything is the teachers' fault for being inadequate, not the parties responsible for depriving those teachers of the tools they need to do their jobs in the first place.
I agree that Albus kept Binns around to discourage students from developing and interest in history, and to keep them as far away from the 20th century, and his own major failings therein, as possible.
Setting all that aside, why would Albus want more teachers under his control? They're stuck at Hogwarts most of the year, making them useful for scut-work only for a few months during the summer. It's much more useful for him to have lackeys scattered throughout the ministry or pursuing independent ventures, like Mrs. Figg and Mundungus Fletcher, who he can tap for their resources throughout the year.
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To illustrate, I really don't think that the school would be any better run if Lupin had stayed on permanently in some capacity. Slughorn in addition to Severus and the DADA-teacher-du-jour *might* have made the place better, but quite possibly not.
> (Also, why would Dumbledore lie about discontinuing Divination? What does he gain from that?)
He has seen to it that everyone views Divination as stupid and unreliable. By saying that he was planning to stop offering it, he's reinforcing that view. He also sounds wiser and less bound by tradition if he was planning to get rid of a useless subject -- two things that are important to his image.
> Setting all that aside, why would Albus want more teachers under his control? They're stuck at Hogwarts most of the year, making them useful for scut-work only for a few months during the summer. It's much more useful for him to have lackeys scattered throughout the ministry or pursuing independent ventures...
It isn't an either-or, teachers or people outside of Hogwarts. For that matter, if there were more "extra" teachers at Hogwarts, the teachers he did have would have more flexibility in their schedules: give the *other* person teaching Transfiguration to take on some additional classes, while McGonagall goes off to do something.
I don't know for sure that Dumbledore would want more teachers, but it strikes me as odd to assume that he'd want fewer.
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The real question is, what is the trade-off in benefits for Albus between having a scarce handful, at best, of personal minions trapped at school for most of the year vs an entire population that is woefully undereducated and poorly equipped to run a functioning society?
It's also important to keep in mind that Dumbledore does have to answer to the school governors, no matter how much he likes to pretend at omnipotence and omniscience. They removed him entirely in CoS, though (Albus claimed) they reinstated him once they panicked about a student's death. If Albus brought in more teachers to make his flunkeys' schedules more flexible, he would have to justify their absences. Opponents like Malfoy would jump on such a concrete example of Dumbledore placing his own personal agenda ahead of his duties to the school.
Most of my argument comes from familiarity with the tactics used to hobble public schools in the US as an excuse to privatize them. First, starve them of funding through budget cuts. This leaves students without necessary classroom resources, including adequate teaching staff.
At the same time, push standardized testing (multiple choice in our world, possibly practical spell performance in the WW) for a more 'objective' way to measure student accomplishment. This forces teachers to teach for the test instead of offering a rounded education. One of the first things to be lost in that trade is the nurturing of critical thinking skills and general problem solving abilities.
When student performance begins to suffer (as predicted,) blame the mess on teachers' unions and other school administrative staff. Replace the most capable resistors with private flunkeys or instigate a new round of budget cuts and 'restructuring' to 'solve' the problem, when in reality these actions serve only to exacerbate it - assuming one defined the original problem as a failure to provide our students with a thorough, liberal education.
The end result is a population well-trained to regurgitate answers on demand, but ill-equipped to solve them on their own, or to navigate propaganda or other spurious, fallacious arguments.
Authoritarian interests of all stripes are vested in such an outcome, because it makes it easier for them to manipulate the people. Additionally, fragmenting the school system makes it easier to institute, let's call them "alternative" standards, such as religious fundamentalists who would rather teach creationism than evolution.
We haven't been exposed to any of the usual arguments about the need to downsize schools or "reform" education, but the more I look at it the more the situation we see in the books is reminiscent of how our school systems function after being subjected to variations on the above-mentioned policies. Albus might have been headmaster of Hogwarts, but I don't think was interested in the education of his students as most commenters here would understand it. Rather the opposite, in fact.
Getting back to Divination, Albus told Harry, alone, he was planning on dropping it until he saw Sybil prophecy, at which point he decided to hire her and retain the class. His goal in that conversation was to convince Harry that Trelawny's prophecies should be taken seriously - why, they even convinced the wise Dumbledore the subject should maintained after all! Saying that he had always believed in the power of true Divination, despite others' short-sighted skepticism, and that Sybil was proof he was right would have been equally effective with Harry. He also knows by that point that Harry doesn't repeat or think critically about their discussions later, so he wouldn't have worried about his general campaign against Divination being disrupted.
Besides, it's unlike Dumbles to offer an outright lie about something it should be possible to fact check, instead of misdirecting his audience toward the desired conclusion.
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No doubt he would like to be. For the good of the school of course. Best to have someone who is actually "on the ground" and knows the issues have final say over the budget, he'd argue. While the governors would naturally disagree, and furthermore object strenuously to Hire X and want him/her gone now. Which Dumbledore ever so politely refuses to do. So the governors decline to post any new positions to try to force Dumbledore's hand, telling him if the new hires are so great they'll manage, and figuring that it'll be too hard to run things without more staff and Dumbledore will cave. Dumbledore retaliates by hiring gross incompetents, figuring once the governors' kids and grandkids are forced to be taught by these people, they'll cave to his demands and give him more control over how many positions are available, as a wedge into getting more control over the purse strings generally.
Or some other variety of a power squabble, if this doesn't quite work. (Never having had a good ringside view of one, I'd need more time to think and work out a really solid scenario.)
And if this happens to lead to the dumbing-down of the curriculum in the meantime, well, he can work with that. After all, it's his duty to ensure the children aren't learning any dangerous magic which might set them on the path to Dark Lord-dom. So cut alchemy as an elective, remove a few more books from the library, cut some of the more difficult and dangerous magic from the core classes... And hey, conveniently the teachers are also too busy to notice what he gets up to. Things are looking rosy after all!
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