How magical are most wizards?
Trying to line up the contradictory statements throughout the series about average magical ability into something coherent is probably a lost cause, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
Based on Harry’s school experiences, it seems like the average witch or wizard ought to be pretty magically powerful. Hogwarts students are expected to turn teapots into tortoises by the end of third year. The OWLs require students to demonstrate spells like making egg cups turn cartwheels, Vanishing iguanas, and banishing Boggarts. And the members of the DA learn what’s supposed to be a very advanced spell, the Patronus Charm, in an evening.
On the other hand, we don’t know how many of those spells students have to perform successfully to get a passing score. Some real-world exams are deliberately set to be so difficult that getting 60% of the questions right is considered pretty good, and 75% about as high as anyone could hope for. (I recall some of the Advanced Placement math and science exams being like this, at least about 20 years ago.) So it’s possible that students can botch quite a few spells on their OWLs and still get decent scores.
With that in mind, here’s Harry’s impression of his Charms practical: "On the whole, Harry thought it went rather well. His Levitation Charm was certainly much better than Malfoy's had been, though he wished he had not mixed up the incantations for Colour Change and Growth Charms, so that the rat he was supposed to be turning orange swelled shockingly and was the size of a badger before Harry could rectify his mistake..."
So, Harry performed one wrong, and a second-which he learned five years ago-was not confirmed as good in any absolute sense but only “better” than Draco’s. We have no idea how this compares to the rest of his practical, but he says of the Defense exam later, "Here, for the first time, Harry felt sure he had passed.” He can’t have performed that many spells successfully on the Charms exam if he wasn’t sure he’d even passed, and yet he earned an Exceeds Expectations. Though maybe he was more worried about the written section. And he did perform that wrong spell successfully, technically. So the issue might be memory, not power.
Still, it makes you wonder whether students aren’t expected to be as capable as the list of exam questions and tasks alone suggests.
Then we get the peculiar claim from Fred and George that a lot of Ministry employees can’t cast a basic Shield Charm. Not that they can’t cast very strong ones, or that they can’t react in time for them to be useful, but that they can’t cast them at all. Many of those employees would be old enough to have taken DADA shortly after the curse kicked in, when it was probably possible to find decent teachers nearly every year; some would be old enough to have studied pre-curse. Even those not much older than Harry could have formed their own study clubs and practiced. And yet that many people can’t perform one of the most basic defensive charms after five to seven years of classes?
We also hear that many people have such “woeful wandwork” that they “find [themselves] making excuses not to perform simple spells,” in the words of Kwikspell’s advertising copy. They may be exaggerating for dramatic effect, but the company exists to make a profit, and they could hardly do that if they didn’t have a large enough market. “Hundreds of witches and wizards have benefitted,” again according to the advertising copy. Within the tiny British wizarding community? Perhaps it’s the worldwide Anglophone community. Or perhaps we ought to revise their claims down a bit and assume the company isn’t as established or successful as they make out. But still.
Worse, lesson one is “Holding Your Wand (Some Useful Tips).” Just how many people within the British or even Anglophone wizarding community don’t even know how to hold a wand properly? One begins to wonder about Lupin’s belief that most British witches and wizards attend Hogwarts. Does he have credible statistics to back that belief?
And then there’s that very odd statement of Neville’s, that even after he magically bounced, his family worried he might not be “magical enough” for Hogwarts. Magical control doesn’t seem to be required for Hogwarts admission, because hardly any students develop anything resembling control over their magic for months after they start, from what we see. Why would think that anyone with enough magical power to bounce after being dropped head-first out the window wouldn’t get a Hogwarts letter? Irrational fear? Or do they know something we don’t? Maybe they know that Filch, or someone else now considered a Squib, performed some comparable magic and yet didn’t get a Hogwarts letter?
Here’s my suspicion: in fact, a large percentage of witches and wizards are magically weak, and many never attend a magical academy. Squibs aren’t as rare as the average wizard believes, either. If you asked every witch and wizard to perform a series of basic spells, many of them just plain couldn’t. Not with any amount of practice or memory-boosting tricks.
What happens is, many families have traditionally put their children through homeschooling and apprenticeships, maybe with some fly-by-night lessons from organizations which are a bit more than tutoring groups but not quite schools. So when a child doesn’t get a Hogwarts letter, or starts Hogwarts but seems too magically weak to succeed (and doesn’t have a family determined to make them succeed, like Neville’s), their family tells everyone that they want their child to learn practical skills instead of silly rats-to-water-goblets spells. Because many magically talented children also do apprenticeships and vocational programs, this isn’t automatically code for “Squib.” People who haven’t observed the child closely might honestly not know whether the kid prefers to learn practical skills or lacks magical power. No one is out gathering data, as far as we know, so even if someone knows a family trying to hide that their children are Squibs, not just working clerical or service jobs which don’t require much magic out of necessity or preference, they might believe-incorrectly-that these are rare exceptions.
The population wouldn’t be neatly split between magically weak people who don’t go to Hogwarts and magically talented people who do, because they can’t always predict aptitude (just look at how wrong everyone got Neville). But the average level of magical power is probably higher among the Hogwarts set, since Squibs don’t get in and magically weak students are probably more likely to leave early than magically strong students.
This leads to an interesting possibility. If people base their expectations of what the average witch or wizard ought to be able to do on a combination of what Hogwarts exams require and what they see people being able to do-or not-they might end up with skewed perceptions. Their conclusions might not be rigorously logical. In fact, they might be downright contradictory, if they actually sat down to work them out step by step, but when have we ever seen the average witch or wizard do that?
So they might think something roughly like this: obviously, the average witch or wizard is powerful, because look at all the hard stuff Hogwarts requires; we know that all that stuff is really hard because look how many people-including those who have never set foot in Hogwarts-can’t do those things. This muddles the abilities of two differently-defined groups: Hogwarts students who pass at least some OWLs versus the entire population.
Things get more interesting if you add historical perspective. Centuries ago, when the wizarding and Muggle worlds weren’t so separate, there would have been more wizard/Muggle marriages, producing children with a range of magical ability. Perhaps until Hogwarts got properly established-or even for a few centuries afterward-they didn’t draw such a sharp distinction between magical and Muggle. Perhaps those who would today be considered Squibs were at one point considered witches and wizards: not powerful enough to handle wands and attend Hogwarts, but witches and wizards all the same.
And what about teaching standards? They aren’t ideal in the Hogwarts we see, but if you look at the history of education, the modern situation improves dramatically by comparison. Medieval and early modern educational institutions were often extremely haphazard affairs. You’d have students roaming from teacher to teacher or even university to university whenever they chose, no set schedule or expectations, frequent riots, students going to school for years without ever quite learning to read… Why should we assume that Hogwarts escaped the social influences that produced these conditions?
Even if we assume it was better than average, a lot of students probably showed up not knowing how to read and with no math skills other than basic counting. Maybe they offered lessons which required little or no reading and writing in the past, or diverted those students into non-Hogwarts vocational programs. But maybe, at least at some points, they took the time to teach basic literacy skills and such. That would leave less time for the kids to practice magic. And if the reading lessons were quick and basic, there might have been a lot of intelligent, talented students who did poorly because they couldn’t get through the required reading or compose acceptable essays. This isn’t exactly uncommon today in more established educational systems; why should Hogwarts centuries ago have done better? It’s possible that even if, like today, the average Hogwarts student of 1300 was more magically powerful than the average witch or wizard from the population as a whole, Hogwarts students in 1300 usually couldn’t perform many more spells than the average hedge witch-as is not true today.
If some spells got a reputation as difficult because most of the magical population couldn’t perform them in 1300, when much of the magical population couldn’t even use wands and many of those who could were poorly trained, this reputation might not hold up when tested against the modern Hogwarts population. That is, it might work like this:
So we find ourselves in an odd position where magic is both harder and easier than wizards generally believe, depending on exactly who is performing it. The magical population as a whole is capable of much less than they think, but most Hogwarts students are capable of more.
Based on Harry’s school experiences, it seems like the average witch or wizard ought to be pretty magically powerful. Hogwarts students are expected to turn teapots into tortoises by the end of third year. The OWLs require students to demonstrate spells like making egg cups turn cartwheels, Vanishing iguanas, and banishing Boggarts. And the members of the DA learn what’s supposed to be a very advanced spell, the Patronus Charm, in an evening.
On the other hand, we don’t know how many of those spells students have to perform successfully to get a passing score. Some real-world exams are deliberately set to be so difficult that getting 60% of the questions right is considered pretty good, and 75% about as high as anyone could hope for. (I recall some of the Advanced Placement math and science exams being like this, at least about 20 years ago.) So it’s possible that students can botch quite a few spells on their OWLs and still get decent scores.
With that in mind, here’s Harry’s impression of his Charms practical: "On the whole, Harry thought it went rather well. His Levitation Charm was certainly much better than Malfoy's had been, though he wished he had not mixed up the incantations for Colour Change and Growth Charms, so that the rat he was supposed to be turning orange swelled shockingly and was the size of a badger before Harry could rectify his mistake..."
So, Harry performed one wrong, and a second-which he learned five years ago-was not confirmed as good in any absolute sense but only “better” than Draco’s. We have no idea how this compares to the rest of his practical, but he says of the Defense exam later, "Here, for the first time, Harry felt sure he had passed.” He can’t have performed that many spells successfully on the Charms exam if he wasn’t sure he’d even passed, and yet he earned an Exceeds Expectations. Though maybe he was more worried about the written section. And he did perform that wrong spell successfully, technically. So the issue might be memory, not power.
Still, it makes you wonder whether students aren’t expected to be as capable as the list of exam questions and tasks alone suggests.
Then we get the peculiar claim from Fred and George that a lot of Ministry employees can’t cast a basic Shield Charm. Not that they can’t cast very strong ones, or that they can’t react in time for them to be useful, but that they can’t cast them at all. Many of those employees would be old enough to have taken DADA shortly after the curse kicked in, when it was probably possible to find decent teachers nearly every year; some would be old enough to have studied pre-curse. Even those not much older than Harry could have formed their own study clubs and practiced. And yet that many people can’t perform one of the most basic defensive charms after five to seven years of classes?
We also hear that many people have such “woeful wandwork” that they “find [themselves] making excuses not to perform simple spells,” in the words of Kwikspell’s advertising copy. They may be exaggerating for dramatic effect, but the company exists to make a profit, and they could hardly do that if they didn’t have a large enough market. “Hundreds of witches and wizards have benefitted,” again according to the advertising copy. Within the tiny British wizarding community? Perhaps it’s the worldwide Anglophone community. Or perhaps we ought to revise their claims down a bit and assume the company isn’t as established or successful as they make out. But still.
Worse, lesson one is “Holding Your Wand (Some Useful Tips).” Just how many people within the British or even Anglophone wizarding community don’t even know how to hold a wand properly? One begins to wonder about Lupin’s belief that most British witches and wizards attend Hogwarts. Does he have credible statistics to back that belief?
And then there’s that very odd statement of Neville’s, that even after he magically bounced, his family worried he might not be “magical enough” for Hogwarts. Magical control doesn’t seem to be required for Hogwarts admission, because hardly any students develop anything resembling control over their magic for months after they start, from what we see. Why would think that anyone with enough magical power to bounce after being dropped head-first out the window wouldn’t get a Hogwarts letter? Irrational fear? Or do they know something we don’t? Maybe they know that Filch, or someone else now considered a Squib, performed some comparable magic and yet didn’t get a Hogwarts letter?
Here’s my suspicion: in fact, a large percentage of witches and wizards are magically weak, and many never attend a magical academy. Squibs aren’t as rare as the average wizard believes, either. If you asked every witch and wizard to perform a series of basic spells, many of them just plain couldn’t. Not with any amount of practice or memory-boosting tricks.
What happens is, many families have traditionally put their children through homeschooling and apprenticeships, maybe with some fly-by-night lessons from organizations which are a bit more than tutoring groups but not quite schools. So when a child doesn’t get a Hogwarts letter, or starts Hogwarts but seems too magically weak to succeed (and doesn’t have a family determined to make them succeed, like Neville’s), their family tells everyone that they want their child to learn practical skills instead of silly rats-to-water-goblets spells. Because many magically talented children also do apprenticeships and vocational programs, this isn’t automatically code for “Squib.” People who haven’t observed the child closely might honestly not know whether the kid prefers to learn practical skills or lacks magical power. No one is out gathering data, as far as we know, so even if someone knows a family trying to hide that their children are Squibs, not just working clerical or service jobs which don’t require much magic out of necessity or preference, they might believe-incorrectly-that these are rare exceptions.
The population wouldn’t be neatly split between magically weak people who don’t go to Hogwarts and magically talented people who do, because they can’t always predict aptitude (just look at how wrong everyone got Neville). But the average level of magical power is probably higher among the Hogwarts set, since Squibs don’t get in and magically weak students are probably more likely to leave early than magically strong students.
This leads to an interesting possibility. If people base their expectations of what the average witch or wizard ought to be able to do on a combination of what Hogwarts exams require and what they see people being able to do-or not-they might end up with skewed perceptions. Their conclusions might not be rigorously logical. In fact, they might be downright contradictory, if they actually sat down to work them out step by step, but when have we ever seen the average witch or wizard do that?
So they might think something roughly like this: obviously, the average witch or wizard is powerful, because look at all the hard stuff Hogwarts requires; we know that all that stuff is really hard because look how many people-including those who have never set foot in Hogwarts-can’t do those things. This muddles the abilities of two differently-defined groups: Hogwarts students who pass at least some OWLs versus the entire population.
Things get more interesting if you add historical perspective. Centuries ago, when the wizarding and Muggle worlds weren’t so separate, there would have been more wizard/Muggle marriages, producing children with a range of magical ability. Perhaps until Hogwarts got properly established-or even for a few centuries afterward-they didn’t draw such a sharp distinction between magical and Muggle. Perhaps those who would today be considered Squibs were at one point considered witches and wizards: not powerful enough to handle wands and attend Hogwarts, but witches and wizards all the same.
And what about teaching standards? They aren’t ideal in the Hogwarts we see, but if you look at the history of education, the modern situation improves dramatically by comparison. Medieval and early modern educational institutions were often extremely haphazard affairs. You’d have students roaming from teacher to teacher or even university to university whenever they chose, no set schedule or expectations, frequent riots, students going to school for years without ever quite learning to read… Why should we assume that Hogwarts escaped the social influences that produced these conditions?
Even if we assume it was better than average, a lot of students probably showed up not knowing how to read and with no math skills other than basic counting. Maybe they offered lessons which required little or no reading and writing in the past, or diverted those students into non-Hogwarts vocational programs. But maybe, at least at some points, they took the time to teach basic literacy skills and such. That would leave less time for the kids to practice magic. And if the reading lessons were quick and basic, there might have been a lot of intelligent, talented students who did poorly because they couldn’t get through the required reading or compose acceptable essays. This isn’t exactly uncommon today in more established educational systems; why should Hogwarts centuries ago have done better? It’s possible that even if, like today, the average Hogwarts student of 1300 was more magically powerful than the average witch or wizard from the population as a whole, Hogwarts students in 1300 usually couldn’t perform many more spells than the average hedge witch-as is not true today.
If some spells got a reputation as difficult because most of the magical population couldn’t perform them in 1300, when much of the magical population couldn’t even use wands and many of those who could were poorly trained, this reputation might not hold up when tested against the modern Hogwarts population. That is, it might work like this:
- Most of the magical population couldn’t perform a Patronus Charm either in 1300 or today no matter how much they practiced;
- Most of the Hogwarts student body couldn’t manage it in 1300 or even 1750, either;
- But many or most Hogwarts students today could manage it.
So we find ourselves in an odd position where magic is both harder and easier than wizards generally believe, depending on exactly who is performing it. The magical population as a whole is capable of much less than they think, but most Hogwarts students are capable of more.