Reasonable Restrictions, Inspired by Oryx_leucoryx
Oryx, your comments inspired me to further thinking. But it got long again….
The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery was passed in 1876.
On the surface, and I’m sure as it was originally presented, the Decree seems a reasonable extension of the Statute of Secrecy. By the terms of the Statute of Secrecy, adults are forbidden to perform magic where Muggles can see (except under emergency conditions). This puts a heavy burden on a witch or wizard to show good judgment, discretion, and awareness of their Muggle neighbors when using magic anywhere but in enclaves invisible to Muggles. Spells that are perfectly permissible in Diagon Alley might make a witch Azkaban-fodder if performed outside the Leaky Cauldron a mere twenty yards away.
We saw at the QWC, with its harried teams of Obliviators, that quite a number of adult witches and wizards, when put to the test, have trouble adjusting their behavior to what the Statute of Secrecy would require. Even Muggle-loving Arthur could not avoid rousing Mr. Robert’s suspicions.
Children are notoriously indiscreet and lacking in good judgment.
So, rather than trying to make them live up to adult standards of restricting their performance of magic whenever Muggles would (or might) see it, which their elders visibly have trouble doing, the Decree takes the simpler approach, much kinder to children than imposing the burden of adult judgment, of simply restricting their spell-casting to school. Anything else is forbidden.
Nothing to remember, nothing to have to think about to guess whether something is acceptable. Raising your wand outside Hogwarts is forbidden and can get you expelled.
With the unspoken exemption that children casting spells within the bosom of their families are assumed to be spell-working on Muggle-warded properties and/or under adult supervision ensuring the spell’s safety-from the point of view of the all-important Statute of Secrecy.
Only-the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery was passed in 1876. When the Muggle-borns had become a significant presence in the WW. And in practice, the Decree was enforced with draconian fierceness against the Muggle-raised (which are in practice all of the Muggle-borns, and some of the Half-Bloods), and not at all against the Purebloods.
And the Decree was written to ban only spell-casting. It’s written to permit unlimited use of pre-charmed objects. Even if enforced strictly across all bloodlines (which it never was), it was never written to allow punishment of children for, say, riding a broom.
Even for riding a broom in full view of Muggles, which Draco, Ron, and Seamus all claim to have done.
Well, the obvious effect of this Decree…. Let’s back off and consider what the old-family Purebloods wanted to accomplish with regard to the (worryingly, increasing) influx of Muggle-borns.
On the one hand, the Purebloods were utterly determined not to relinquish one iota of their cultural and economic supremacy.
On the other, the simplest way of accomplishing this, utterly dismissing all the Muggle-borns from the WW and training, bumped up against the Statute of Secrecy. If Muggle-borns (especially given that their number seemed to be increasing) were NOT incorporated into the Secluded Wizarding World, they might instead start experimenting with their magic, even eventually connecting with each other, and alert the Muggle world to the existence of magic while remaining outside the WW’s social and legal control.
No, Muggle-borns MUST be assimilated; this is imperative. A single Muggle-born with sufficient power and good connections could, potentially, destroy Secrecy entirely.
Moreover, there aren’t enough Purebloods left to run the WW. The mixed-bloods and Muggleborns are needed for the menial positions. Moreover, there must be a mechanism to allow the best and brightest of the new blood to be co-opted to the service of the WW as it is. If you don’t allow talent any chance at all to rise, it will instead revolt. Hence the Slug Club.
But at the same time, the Purebloods don’t want to give the Muggle-borns any chance of taking real power from their own scions.
Therefore the Decree. Reasonable (it even calls itself that). Since children cannot fairly be expected to judge whether their use of magic might violate the all-important Statute of Secrecy, the Ministry instead bans all use of deliberate spell-casting by minors outside of school.
So what happens? In Muggle families with magical children, like the Creeveys or the Dursleys, any out-of-school display of magic is met by the full weight of the Ministry’s displeasure.
In families like the Weasleys, children perform magic ALL THE TIME-they ride brooms, they drive charmed cars, they de-gnome the garden, they play Exploding Snap. But they avoid using their wands to cast spells, because that’s illegal magic which could get them (and their families) in trouble. And Mum will yell at us if we disobey openly.
In families like the Malfoys, children also do magic all the time. But these children know that their out-of-school use of magic is accepted, so long as they are reasonably discreet. The real rule is, don’t do anything the Ministry would be required to notice.
However, the brightest kids among the half-blood and less well-connected Pureblood families will eventually notice that their brewing and wand-waving bring no untoward response from the Ministry-as long as they are done on the family property. The twins and those explosions coming from their bedroom, the half-blood Prince zapping flies in his….
(Actually, brewing, like using charmed objects, may be another quiet built-in exception-Mafalda’s citation of the Decree specifies spell-casting and that alone as the forbidden activity. And if Severus or Lily noticed that, that may account for why Potions in particular became one of Severus’s-and according to Horace, Lily’s-specialties. If they figured out early that brewing wasn’t monitored, that would have seemed the one subject they could safely practice back at Cokesworth. And once one gets a reputation for being particularly talented in one subject and becomes the object of positive attention from that master, the reinforcement will lead one to keep it up. Even if one subsequently discovers that wand-waving in the Evans home gets one busted, but in Eileen Snape’s home does not… )
Now think of the effects of this Decree over the next century, as it affects child after child, Pureblood or Mudblood, privileged or not.
Starting Hogwarts, a wizard-raised child will have pronounced advantages over the Muggle-raised.
This was obscured for us readers by the fact that our paradigmatic Muggle-born was Hermione, while our wizard-born exemplar was Ron. Hermione is a dedicated swot and ambitious, grimly mastering any material presented in her books (which she’d been memorizing for five weeks before we met her)-and she’s above-average in power to boot, plus being the oldest (or nearly so) in her year. Whereas Ron was essentially raised (or at least acculturated) by the Twins. Much of what he “knew” starting Hogwarts was wrong, and he followed their lead in skiving off schoolwork as much as possible. Why, we are even told, “Harry was very relieved to find out that he wasn’t miles behind everyone else. Lots of people had come from Muggle families…. There was so much to learn that even people like Ron didn’t have much of a head start.”
Of course, if most people can’t control magical flows until they reach a certain level of physical maturity-which normally starts shortly before puberty, around age eleven-then hardly anyone would be able to start Hogwarts with a “head start” in actual spell-casting, whatever magical tutoring their families might have given them, But in magical theory, knowledge of incantations, basic potions-making techniques like measuring, mincing, and stewing…? (Sirius said, “Snape knew more curses when he arrived at school than half the kids in seventh year.” He never said Snape was already able to cast them all.)
But really, Hermione and Ron are exceptional. Harry shouldn’t have been comparing himself to “people like Ron,” but to people like Draco and Ernie. (Notice that we never see Justin congratulating himself that his wizard-raised housemates don’t have much of a head start.)
No, most of the time, the Decree would work as it is designed to. Maintaining that original advantage held by all the wizard-raised, and ensuring that a further advantage accrues to the scions of those families in the know of how the Decree is really enforced.
Children would attend Hogwarts from diverse backgrounds. Some of them would be Muggle-born, and utterly befuddled by their new experiences.
And however much they learned and struggled to catch up to their magically-reared compatriots, then they would go home for the holidays, forbidden to practice. And start the next term behind, again.
Especially given the fact that spell-casting involves proper physical wand technique and enunciation-remember Flitwick’s lessons. Hermione, if not Harry, can at least crack the books at home. But she can’t practice. Imagine training to be a concert pianist, and being told that for two weeks each Christmas and Easter, and then for TEN weeks over the summer, you’re forbidden to touch a keyboard. Meanwhile your rivals are busily practicing away….
The smartest and most ambitious of the Muggle-borns would figure out early on that if they didn’t want to lose ground every holiday, they had to stay at Hogwarts. (And eventually some might realize-or be told, if they’d made the right friends-that if they stayed with Wizarding friends’ families for the long summer vacation that would give them an additional advantage.) So the best and brightest would be under strong pressure to leave behind their Muggle families, to associate more and more completely with their magical peers, just to keep from falling behind.
Hermione’s response, to associate more and more with the Weasley family and less and less with her own, was what the Purebloods who passed the law were AIMING for. She and Harry were effectively adopted into, and ended up marrying into, a Pureblood family. Which, if it keeps its marriages clean, will in six generations be considered pure enough again to marry back into the noble and most ancient houses, like the Blacks. We saw that with Ernie’s family.
Moreover, even within the WW, those old families who know the Decree is not going to be enforced against their children are able to give their children an advantage over the simpletons like the Weasleys who make an attempt at restricting their children’s wand-waving.
Why, after all, should Hogwarts follow the custom of having a long summer vacation (ten to eleven weeks)? It was founded before the Norman Conquest-why should any of its traditions match ours? And who says for how long the tradition of starting on September first and ending shortly after the summer solstice has been in place?
Teachers of my acquaintance complain that the summer vacation is too long-that it’s so long that children forget much of what they’d learned the year before.
And maybe that’s the point. To give the Pureblood families the chance to give their children an opportunity to pull ahead. Since their children can practice at home under parental supervision, or even (for the richer) with tutors. (As in-how did Severus know that Draco knew Serpensortia?)
I point out again: Draco, our example of a Pureblood being groomed by a rich family for a position of power in their culture, started his first year knowing how to brew, how to fly, and how to cast (at least) the leg-locker jinx. Compare that to either Ron or Harry. His second year, Draco demonstrated a hex before the Dueling Club that was NEWT level. The summer before the sixth year, he was trained in Occlumency (to a high level!) and the Unforgiveables by his aunt. Whatever we may think of the ethics of that last course of instruction, he was clearly being tutored to perform well in advance of his peers. So, since we see evidence of advanced training prior to three of Draco’s school years, I think we may safely infer it was the Malfoy practice before all of them.
Of course, the Decree only restricts Underage Sorcery. Once the ambitious witch or wizard turns seventeen, sometime during or after sixth year, s/he can practice as much as s/he wants at home.
Only by then it’s too late. The OWLs are administered at the end of fifth year (and the Beauxbatons qualifying exams at the end of sixth).
By the time a Muggle-born (or not-in-the-know Pureblood or half-blood) is free to practice at home, it’s too late to make any difference on those all-important exams, which determine both one’s initial reputation in the wider Wizarding World (maybe lifelong reputation, given how memories linger in a small community-consider Griselda’s century-later cooing over Albus!), and also whether one is to be permitted further training.
The OWLs and NEWTs are presented to everyone as a fair assessment of students’ magical attainments and ability.
Oddly enough, the scions of the families like the Malfoys and the Crouches just happen to garner more OWLs and NEWTs than the general population does. Just reflects the old families’ merit, you see. Blood tells.
Well. We’ve already seen that in practice, a favored student or two may be offered an opportunity to earn extra credit in the practicals. Tofty was perfectly open, too, in soliciting Harry’s Patronus-the thing cantered right down the examination room in front of everybody, including Umbridge. That was business as usual, not a favor covertly offered Harry by a fan.
But even without bias in the examiners, the scions of the old families have an automatic advantage.
Only the most driven and talented of the Muggle-borns and Half-bloods even have a look-in at doing equally well, and no wonder. For all of their first years at Hogwarts, they’re missing up to one-quarter of the practice time (and possibly of the training) the more privileged Purebloods get!
Ten weeks summer vacation, two weeks at Christmas, two weeks at Easter. It adds up.
For any Muggle-born who doesn’t effectively repudiate hir family of birth, and stay in the WW over term breaks. And find a way to do so even for the long one.
Oh, the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery is reasonable, indeed.
But oryx_leucoryx has made me realize there may even be another reason for the Decree as well. Why, after all, were Hermione’s parents willing to let her spend all her holidays away from them?
Consider Harry’s bursts of uncontrolled magic. Consider their timing. We don’t know their periodicity when he was little, but we do know that they were rare-perhaps a couple of times a year max, starting about when he started school. (The hair-regrowing was the only constant before then, and hair may be a separate issue. See Petunia’s theories.) Then when he was eleven, he had a outbreak on Dudley’s birthday, June 23rd. And then no more between then and when he started Hogwarts, even though he was under considerable emotional excitation during that time.
At the end of his first year he was almost killed in the encounter with Quirrel!Mort-and he had no outbreaks, even when he was locked up by the Dursleys, before the Weasleys boys rescued him in early August. At the end of second year, he had the encounter with Diary!Tom in late May-but he didn’t noticeably use much magic to defeat him. (I should imagine that the sword of Gryffindor took some magic, as well as courage, to wield-but it’s an object of magical virtue in itself). Exams were cancelled that year, so he didn’t have anything magically draining to do in June (though he did practice Expelliarmus on the Hogwarts Express). That year, after six weeks of not using magic at all, he “blew up” Aunt Marge.
Near the end of that third year he performed a feat of magic that was considered extraordinary (even without considering his youth)-casting a Patronus powerful enough to repel a crowd of Dementors. And at home that summer, even with the pressures of the Scar-o-Vision starting up and sharing Dudley’s diet, he had no magical outbursts before mid-August when the Weasleys collect him for the World Cup. That school year, of course, ended with his duel of wills and magic with Tom, and with Harry’s forcing the Priori Incantatum effect back upon Tom’s wand. And again, despite all the CAPSLOCKING Harry engaged in that summer, Harry had no magical accidents before the Dementor attack.
So the only summer Harry does have a magical outburst, is the year he’d been doing nothing magically depleting for a month before the end of school. And then the outburst happened after six weeks of no magic.
If we hypothesize that magic channellers, if they fail to use magic for too long, have a “charge” build up until an strong emotion triggers an explosive release-well, how long does it normally take for that charge to build up? I’d love to interview Aberforth on this issue.
Severus said that kids are let off when they don’t have wands and can’t help it-and not after. But Fudge’s excuse, if not his reason, for letting Harry off about blowing up Aunt Marge was that Harry couldn’t help it. What if Fudge really did realize that Harry’s outburst was (or at least might be) involuntary? That living with Muggles, constrained from doing magic, his magic might have broken out explosively?
One possible mitigating factor-is it possible that just carrying a wand channels enough magic to prevent a buildup? If so, those Muggle-borns whose families, like the Evans (parents) and Grangers, supported their children’s developing odd talent would be protected from outbreaks. And then Sev’s comment to Lily could be accurate as well as sincere-children carrying wands are known not to be subject to accidental outbursts, so any magic done by them may safely be inferred to be deliberate.
But if merely carrying a wand does NOT ground the energies… How long would a child or teen living in a Muggle home, with no charmed objects or magical creatures** or plants to interact with… how long, on average, would one expect someone to go without using controlled magic before a magical outbreak becomes increasingly likely?
Twelve weeks? Eight? Six?
Put it this way-unless it averages well over ten weeks for the energies to build up, it is predictable that a number of Muggle-raised children will have incidents like Harry’s with Aunt Marge every summer. And maybe that’s considered a bonus of having such a long vacation, not a drawback.
It gives the Ministry the opportunity to frighten the children and families with that firm automatic first response from Mafalda Hopkirk. And then the Ministry has its choice of what to do next, depending on how much of an asset to the WW the particular young witch or wizard seems to be. A second offense could be prosecuted with severity. Or, someone could explain to the frightened child and worried parents that magical children really need to be around other magic-users to ground their powers and prevent such outbursts, and that summer visits to good wizardng families should really be encouraged for the child’s-and family’s-own safety….
Recall what Petunia flung at Lily at King’s Cross-“It’s good that you’re separated from normal people. It’s for our safety!”
One might use many adjectives of Petunia, but imaginative is really not among them, is it? She’s not good at making things up. So she had that taunt from somewhere. The only wizard with whom she’d been in private communication was the headmaster of Hogwarts.
And really, the last two pieces of accidental magic Harry performed on his family were releasing a dangerous wild creature to threaten Dudley, and blowing up Aunt Marge, either of which could have been lethal. What height would Aunt Marge have attained when Harry’s magic finally wore off and she deflated spontaneously? Harry wasn’t purposefully trying to kill her, but he might easily have done so. Magical temper tantrums are indeed not to be sneezed at.
A final consideration-if failure to use controlled magic condemns a magical human to uncontrolled outbursts, what happens to people who, like Hagrid, are punished for youthful crimes by expulsion from Hogwarts plus wand-snapping? They’d be breaches of the Statute of Secrecy waiting to happen!
Unless, of course, they are offered menial jobs in the WW that keep them using enough low-grade magic to prevent eruptions. A lifetime sentence to community service, if you will. Hagrid may have even less reason to be grateful to Albus than we’d thought-his being offered a place somewhere might have been a foregone conclusion.
(And how does St. Mungo’s address this problem, with those in long-term care?)
The biggest problem with all this is that it requires someone in the WW to be quite a bit cleverer and more attentive to consequences than seems the norm. But of course if Phineas Nigellus, like Albus, spent his entire career at Hogwarts, by his late twenties he’d have seen the problem of Muggle-born incursions first-hand…. Conversely, if his lifelong goal was to control the effects of the increasing Muggle-born (and half-blood) population on Wizarding society, to arrest the decline of Pureblood culture and bloodlines, what better position than Headmaster of Hogwarts to do it from? Sirius somehow doesn’t give one the impression that his great-great-grandfather held the post of Headmaster because he liked kiddies….
**Oh my goodness-magical creatures, animal associates, as siphons to keep magical energies from building up to excess. Witches have always had familiars! A possible reason for Argus and Arabella to have such close relationships with their cats. There’s a magical connection which is, among other things, keeping their limited magic from ever erupting out of control. And Hagrid was given the job of assistant gamekeeper, and Harry’s one outburst after he started Hogwarts came after he’d sent Hedwig off a week earlier…. And in the Weasley family, the twins are cruel to animals-they’re the only Weasley children we see who never have or want a pet, never form that magical connection, and Fred is the only one we know to have had a magical outburst!
In which case Crookshanks may have protected Hermione from (further?) magical outbreaks. We’re free still to imagine that she previously had had some magical tantrums and badly spooked her parents, who were, we saw, increasingly willing to let her stay with the Weasleys. Indeed, acquiring a familiar may have been suggested to Hermione as a solution to the problem of accidental magical outbursts. Or possibly it was just suggested to her that an owl would be so useful, you know, for staying in touch. Then you wouldn’t have to rely on your friends contacting you. So Hermione might or might not have realized that Crookshanks would afford her protection against having accidental outbursts-and she might or might not have told her parents if she did. It must be pretty heady for a not-quite-fourteen year old to have her parents be a little scared of upsetting her too much.
The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery was passed in 1876.
On the surface, and I’m sure as it was originally presented, the Decree seems a reasonable extension of the Statute of Secrecy. By the terms of the Statute of Secrecy, adults are forbidden to perform magic where Muggles can see (except under emergency conditions). This puts a heavy burden on a witch or wizard to show good judgment, discretion, and awareness of their Muggle neighbors when using magic anywhere but in enclaves invisible to Muggles. Spells that are perfectly permissible in Diagon Alley might make a witch Azkaban-fodder if performed outside the Leaky Cauldron a mere twenty yards away.
We saw at the QWC, with its harried teams of Obliviators, that quite a number of adult witches and wizards, when put to the test, have trouble adjusting their behavior to what the Statute of Secrecy would require. Even Muggle-loving Arthur could not avoid rousing Mr. Robert’s suspicions.
Children are notoriously indiscreet and lacking in good judgment.
So, rather than trying to make them live up to adult standards of restricting their performance of magic whenever Muggles would (or might) see it, which their elders visibly have trouble doing, the Decree takes the simpler approach, much kinder to children than imposing the burden of adult judgment, of simply restricting their spell-casting to school. Anything else is forbidden.
Nothing to remember, nothing to have to think about to guess whether something is acceptable. Raising your wand outside Hogwarts is forbidden and can get you expelled.
With the unspoken exemption that children casting spells within the bosom of their families are assumed to be spell-working on Muggle-warded properties and/or under adult supervision ensuring the spell’s safety-from the point of view of the all-important Statute of Secrecy.
Only-the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery was passed in 1876. When the Muggle-borns had become a significant presence in the WW. And in practice, the Decree was enforced with draconian fierceness against the Muggle-raised (which are in practice all of the Muggle-borns, and some of the Half-Bloods), and not at all against the Purebloods.
And the Decree was written to ban only spell-casting. It’s written to permit unlimited use of pre-charmed objects. Even if enforced strictly across all bloodlines (which it never was), it was never written to allow punishment of children for, say, riding a broom.
Even for riding a broom in full view of Muggles, which Draco, Ron, and Seamus all claim to have done.
Well, the obvious effect of this Decree…. Let’s back off and consider what the old-family Purebloods wanted to accomplish with regard to the (worryingly, increasing) influx of Muggle-borns.
On the one hand, the Purebloods were utterly determined not to relinquish one iota of their cultural and economic supremacy.
On the other, the simplest way of accomplishing this, utterly dismissing all the Muggle-borns from the WW and training, bumped up against the Statute of Secrecy. If Muggle-borns (especially given that their number seemed to be increasing) were NOT incorporated into the Secluded Wizarding World, they might instead start experimenting with their magic, even eventually connecting with each other, and alert the Muggle world to the existence of magic while remaining outside the WW’s social and legal control.
No, Muggle-borns MUST be assimilated; this is imperative. A single Muggle-born with sufficient power and good connections could, potentially, destroy Secrecy entirely.
Moreover, there aren’t enough Purebloods left to run the WW. The mixed-bloods and Muggleborns are needed for the menial positions. Moreover, there must be a mechanism to allow the best and brightest of the new blood to be co-opted to the service of the WW as it is. If you don’t allow talent any chance at all to rise, it will instead revolt. Hence the Slug Club.
But at the same time, the Purebloods don’t want to give the Muggle-borns any chance of taking real power from their own scions.
Therefore the Decree. Reasonable (it even calls itself that). Since children cannot fairly be expected to judge whether their use of magic might violate the all-important Statute of Secrecy, the Ministry instead bans all use of deliberate spell-casting by minors outside of school.
So what happens? In Muggle families with magical children, like the Creeveys or the Dursleys, any out-of-school display of magic is met by the full weight of the Ministry’s displeasure.
In families like the Weasleys, children perform magic ALL THE TIME-they ride brooms, they drive charmed cars, they de-gnome the garden, they play Exploding Snap. But they avoid using their wands to cast spells, because that’s illegal magic which could get them (and their families) in trouble. And Mum will yell at us if we disobey openly.
In families like the Malfoys, children also do magic all the time. But these children know that their out-of-school use of magic is accepted, so long as they are reasonably discreet. The real rule is, don’t do anything the Ministry would be required to notice.
However, the brightest kids among the half-blood and less well-connected Pureblood families will eventually notice that their brewing and wand-waving bring no untoward response from the Ministry-as long as they are done on the family property. The twins and those explosions coming from their bedroom, the half-blood Prince zapping flies in his….
(Actually, brewing, like using charmed objects, may be another quiet built-in exception-Mafalda’s citation of the Decree specifies spell-casting and that alone as the forbidden activity. And if Severus or Lily noticed that, that may account for why Potions in particular became one of Severus’s-and according to Horace, Lily’s-specialties. If they figured out early that brewing wasn’t monitored, that would have seemed the one subject they could safely practice back at Cokesworth. And once one gets a reputation for being particularly talented in one subject and becomes the object of positive attention from that master, the reinforcement will lead one to keep it up. Even if one subsequently discovers that wand-waving in the Evans home gets one busted, but in Eileen Snape’s home does not… )
Now think of the effects of this Decree over the next century, as it affects child after child, Pureblood or Mudblood, privileged or not.
Starting Hogwarts, a wizard-raised child will have pronounced advantages over the Muggle-raised.
This was obscured for us readers by the fact that our paradigmatic Muggle-born was Hermione, while our wizard-born exemplar was Ron. Hermione is a dedicated swot and ambitious, grimly mastering any material presented in her books (which she’d been memorizing for five weeks before we met her)-and she’s above-average in power to boot, plus being the oldest (or nearly so) in her year. Whereas Ron was essentially raised (or at least acculturated) by the Twins. Much of what he “knew” starting Hogwarts was wrong, and he followed their lead in skiving off schoolwork as much as possible. Why, we are even told, “Harry was very relieved to find out that he wasn’t miles behind everyone else. Lots of people had come from Muggle families…. There was so much to learn that even people like Ron didn’t have much of a head start.”
Of course, if most people can’t control magical flows until they reach a certain level of physical maturity-which normally starts shortly before puberty, around age eleven-then hardly anyone would be able to start Hogwarts with a “head start” in actual spell-casting, whatever magical tutoring their families might have given them, But in magical theory, knowledge of incantations, basic potions-making techniques like measuring, mincing, and stewing…? (Sirius said, “Snape knew more curses when he arrived at school than half the kids in seventh year.” He never said Snape was already able to cast them all.)
But really, Hermione and Ron are exceptional. Harry shouldn’t have been comparing himself to “people like Ron,” but to people like Draco and Ernie. (Notice that we never see Justin congratulating himself that his wizard-raised housemates don’t have much of a head start.)
No, most of the time, the Decree would work as it is designed to. Maintaining that original advantage held by all the wizard-raised, and ensuring that a further advantage accrues to the scions of those families in the know of how the Decree is really enforced.
Children would attend Hogwarts from diverse backgrounds. Some of them would be Muggle-born, and utterly befuddled by their new experiences.
And however much they learned and struggled to catch up to their magically-reared compatriots, then they would go home for the holidays, forbidden to practice. And start the next term behind, again.
Especially given the fact that spell-casting involves proper physical wand technique and enunciation-remember Flitwick’s lessons. Hermione, if not Harry, can at least crack the books at home. But she can’t practice. Imagine training to be a concert pianist, and being told that for two weeks each Christmas and Easter, and then for TEN weeks over the summer, you’re forbidden to touch a keyboard. Meanwhile your rivals are busily practicing away….
The smartest and most ambitious of the Muggle-borns would figure out early on that if they didn’t want to lose ground every holiday, they had to stay at Hogwarts. (And eventually some might realize-or be told, if they’d made the right friends-that if they stayed with Wizarding friends’ families for the long summer vacation that would give them an additional advantage.) So the best and brightest would be under strong pressure to leave behind their Muggle families, to associate more and more completely with their magical peers, just to keep from falling behind.
Hermione’s response, to associate more and more with the Weasley family and less and less with her own, was what the Purebloods who passed the law were AIMING for. She and Harry were effectively adopted into, and ended up marrying into, a Pureblood family. Which, if it keeps its marriages clean, will in six generations be considered pure enough again to marry back into the noble and most ancient houses, like the Blacks. We saw that with Ernie’s family.
Moreover, even within the WW, those old families who know the Decree is not going to be enforced against their children are able to give their children an advantage over the simpletons like the Weasleys who make an attempt at restricting their children’s wand-waving.
Why, after all, should Hogwarts follow the custom of having a long summer vacation (ten to eleven weeks)? It was founded before the Norman Conquest-why should any of its traditions match ours? And who says for how long the tradition of starting on September first and ending shortly after the summer solstice has been in place?
Teachers of my acquaintance complain that the summer vacation is too long-that it’s so long that children forget much of what they’d learned the year before.
And maybe that’s the point. To give the Pureblood families the chance to give their children an opportunity to pull ahead. Since their children can practice at home under parental supervision, or even (for the richer) with tutors. (As in-how did Severus know that Draco knew Serpensortia?)
I point out again: Draco, our example of a Pureblood being groomed by a rich family for a position of power in their culture, started his first year knowing how to brew, how to fly, and how to cast (at least) the leg-locker jinx. Compare that to either Ron or Harry. His second year, Draco demonstrated a hex before the Dueling Club that was NEWT level. The summer before the sixth year, he was trained in Occlumency (to a high level!) and the Unforgiveables by his aunt. Whatever we may think of the ethics of that last course of instruction, he was clearly being tutored to perform well in advance of his peers. So, since we see evidence of advanced training prior to three of Draco’s school years, I think we may safely infer it was the Malfoy practice before all of them.
Of course, the Decree only restricts Underage Sorcery. Once the ambitious witch or wizard turns seventeen, sometime during or after sixth year, s/he can practice as much as s/he wants at home.
Only by then it’s too late. The OWLs are administered at the end of fifth year (and the Beauxbatons qualifying exams at the end of sixth).
By the time a Muggle-born (or not-in-the-know Pureblood or half-blood) is free to practice at home, it’s too late to make any difference on those all-important exams, which determine both one’s initial reputation in the wider Wizarding World (maybe lifelong reputation, given how memories linger in a small community-consider Griselda’s century-later cooing over Albus!), and also whether one is to be permitted further training.
The OWLs and NEWTs are presented to everyone as a fair assessment of students’ magical attainments and ability.
Oddly enough, the scions of the families like the Malfoys and the Crouches just happen to garner more OWLs and NEWTs than the general population does. Just reflects the old families’ merit, you see. Blood tells.
Well. We’ve already seen that in practice, a favored student or two may be offered an opportunity to earn extra credit in the practicals. Tofty was perfectly open, too, in soliciting Harry’s Patronus-the thing cantered right down the examination room in front of everybody, including Umbridge. That was business as usual, not a favor covertly offered Harry by a fan.
But even without bias in the examiners, the scions of the old families have an automatic advantage.
Only the most driven and talented of the Muggle-borns and Half-bloods even have a look-in at doing equally well, and no wonder. For all of their first years at Hogwarts, they’re missing up to one-quarter of the practice time (and possibly of the training) the more privileged Purebloods get!
Ten weeks summer vacation, two weeks at Christmas, two weeks at Easter. It adds up.
For any Muggle-born who doesn’t effectively repudiate hir family of birth, and stay in the WW over term breaks. And find a way to do so even for the long one.
Oh, the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underaged Sorcery is reasonable, indeed.
But oryx_leucoryx has made me realize there may even be another reason for the Decree as well. Why, after all, were Hermione’s parents willing to let her spend all her holidays away from them?
Consider Harry’s bursts of uncontrolled magic. Consider their timing. We don’t know their periodicity when he was little, but we do know that they were rare-perhaps a couple of times a year max, starting about when he started school. (The hair-regrowing was the only constant before then, and hair may be a separate issue. See Petunia’s theories.) Then when he was eleven, he had a outbreak on Dudley’s birthday, June 23rd. And then no more between then and when he started Hogwarts, even though he was under considerable emotional excitation during that time.
At the end of his first year he was almost killed in the encounter with Quirrel!Mort-and he had no outbreaks, even when he was locked up by the Dursleys, before the Weasleys boys rescued him in early August. At the end of second year, he had the encounter with Diary!Tom in late May-but he didn’t noticeably use much magic to defeat him. (I should imagine that the sword of Gryffindor took some magic, as well as courage, to wield-but it’s an object of magical virtue in itself). Exams were cancelled that year, so he didn’t have anything magically draining to do in June (though he did practice Expelliarmus on the Hogwarts Express). That year, after six weeks of not using magic at all, he “blew up” Aunt Marge.
Near the end of that third year he performed a feat of magic that was considered extraordinary (even without considering his youth)-casting a Patronus powerful enough to repel a crowd of Dementors. And at home that summer, even with the pressures of the Scar-o-Vision starting up and sharing Dudley’s diet, he had no magical outbursts before mid-August when the Weasleys collect him for the World Cup. That school year, of course, ended with his duel of wills and magic with Tom, and with Harry’s forcing the Priori Incantatum effect back upon Tom’s wand. And again, despite all the CAPSLOCKING Harry engaged in that summer, Harry had no magical accidents before the Dementor attack.
So the only summer Harry does have a magical outburst, is the year he’d been doing nothing magically depleting for a month before the end of school. And then the outburst happened after six weeks of no magic.
If we hypothesize that magic channellers, if they fail to use magic for too long, have a “charge” build up until an strong emotion triggers an explosive release-well, how long does it normally take for that charge to build up? I’d love to interview Aberforth on this issue.
Severus said that kids are let off when they don’t have wands and can’t help it-and not after. But Fudge’s excuse, if not his reason, for letting Harry off about blowing up Aunt Marge was that Harry couldn’t help it. What if Fudge really did realize that Harry’s outburst was (or at least might be) involuntary? That living with Muggles, constrained from doing magic, his magic might have broken out explosively?
One possible mitigating factor-is it possible that just carrying a wand channels enough magic to prevent a buildup? If so, those Muggle-borns whose families, like the Evans (parents) and Grangers, supported their children’s developing odd talent would be protected from outbreaks. And then Sev’s comment to Lily could be accurate as well as sincere-children carrying wands are known not to be subject to accidental outbursts, so any magic done by them may safely be inferred to be deliberate.
But if merely carrying a wand does NOT ground the energies… How long would a child or teen living in a Muggle home, with no charmed objects or magical creatures** or plants to interact with… how long, on average, would one expect someone to go without using controlled magic before a magical outbreak becomes increasingly likely?
Twelve weeks? Eight? Six?
Put it this way-unless it averages well over ten weeks for the energies to build up, it is predictable that a number of Muggle-raised children will have incidents like Harry’s with Aunt Marge every summer. And maybe that’s considered a bonus of having such a long vacation, not a drawback.
It gives the Ministry the opportunity to frighten the children and families with that firm automatic first response from Mafalda Hopkirk. And then the Ministry has its choice of what to do next, depending on how much of an asset to the WW the particular young witch or wizard seems to be. A second offense could be prosecuted with severity. Or, someone could explain to the frightened child and worried parents that magical children really need to be around other magic-users to ground their powers and prevent such outbursts, and that summer visits to good wizardng families should really be encouraged for the child’s-and family’s-own safety….
Recall what Petunia flung at Lily at King’s Cross-“It’s good that you’re separated from normal people. It’s for our safety!”
One might use many adjectives of Petunia, but imaginative is really not among them, is it? She’s not good at making things up. So she had that taunt from somewhere. The only wizard with whom she’d been in private communication was the headmaster of Hogwarts.
And really, the last two pieces of accidental magic Harry performed on his family were releasing a dangerous wild creature to threaten Dudley, and blowing up Aunt Marge, either of which could have been lethal. What height would Aunt Marge have attained when Harry’s magic finally wore off and she deflated spontaneously? Harry wasn’t purposefully trying to kill her, but he might easily have done so. Magical temper tantrums are indeed not to be sneezed at.
A final consideration-if failure to use controlled magic condemns a magical human to uncontrolled outbursts, what happens to people who, like Hagrid, are punished for youthful crimes by expulsion from Hogwarts plus wand-snapping? They’d be breaches of the Statute of Secrecy waiting to happen!
Unless, of course, they are offered menial jobs in the WW that keep them using enough low-grade magic to prevent eruptions. A lifetime sentence to community service, if you will. Hagrid may have even less reason to be grateful to Albus than we’d thought-his being offered a place somewhere might have been a foregone conclusion.
(And how does St. Mungo’s address this problem, with those in long-term care?)
The biggest problem with all this is that it requires someone in the WW to be quite a bit cleverer and more attentive to consequences than seems the norm. But of course if Phineas Nigellus, like Albus, spent his entire career at Hogwarts, by his late twenties he’d have seen the problem of Muggle-born incursions first-hand…. Conversely, if his lifelong goal was to control the effects of the increasing Muggle-born (and half-blood) population on Wizarding society, to arrest the decline of Pureblood culture and bloodlines, what better position than Headmaster of Hogwarts to do it from? Sirius somehow doesn’t give one the impression that his great-great-grandfather held the post of Headmaster because he liked kiddies….
**Oh my goodness-magical creatures, animal associates, as siphons to keep magical energies from building up to excess. Witches have always had familiars! A possible reason for Argus and Arabella to have such close relationships with their cats. There’s a magical connection which is, among other things, keeping their limited magic from ever erupting out of control. And Hagrid was given the job of assistant gamekeeper, and Harry’s one outburst after he started Hogwarts came after he’d sent Hedwig off a week earlier…. And in the Weasley family, the twins are cruel to animals-they’re the only Weasley children we see who never have or want a pet, never form that magical connection, and Fred is the only one we know to have had a magical outburst!
In which case Crookshanks may have protected Hermione from (further?) magical outbreaks. We’re free still to imagine that she previously had had some magical tantrums and badly spooked her parents, who were, we saw, increasingly willing to let her stay with the Weasleys. Indeed, acquiring a familiar may have been suggested to Hermione as a solution to the problem of accidental magical outbursts. Or possibly it was just suggested to her that an owl would be so useful, you know, for staying in touch. Then you wouldn’t have to rely on your friends contacting you. So Hermione might or might not have realized that Crookshanks would afford her protection against having accidental outbursts-and she might or might not have told her parents if she did. It must be pretty heady for a not-quite-fourteen year old to have her parents be a little scared of upsetting her too much.