In the books it is clear that those from magical families have no advantage over their counterparts who were not brought up around magic. I feel this suits the whole idea of fairness and anybody can be a hero theme in the books but would not be the case in reality.
I have read some fics where Durmstrang doesn't let in muggleborns because they were too far behind, others where it was Salazar Slytherin who said this and the idea later became hatred of muggleborns. Is there any where the advantage is show from the start at Hogwarts, other than Neville in Herbology?
What level advantage should being raised in a magical family. I can understand no wand/practical magic before eleven due to emotional stability and its relationship to magic or something similar to that but Runes, general theory, astronomy, herbology and History could all be subjects that muggleborns or muggle raised children should be far behind in.
What would have become of Tom Riddle where he to be behind other wizards, would the unfairness motivate him even more or would the others be so far ahead he would have been stopped earlier?

 

Magic-raised kids have actually several advantages over muggleborns, but not necessarily in school education.

Muggleborns don't know about things like Floo Travel, Azkaban, Knight Bus and loads of other things.

For example, Harry did not know what the Trace was until he was 17! And I dare say that this is quite embarrassing given that it's kind of a big deal for someone living among muggles.

Of course, we know that the real reason for it is that Rowling did not invent the Trace before DH, but in-universe it's Harry's fault for not being interested enough in the new society he's going to be living in.

 

Assuming you're correct in that there isn't any practice in wand-waving or practical magic before eleven, there's still plenty of opportunities for magical-raised children to have advantages over muggle-raised, not just the astronomy/herbology you mention.

The first one to spring to mind is that their parents have experience which they can pass on. The first example of this (always picked up in muggle-wank stories) is using quills - I don't know about everyone else, but in my primary schools, the kids are taught to write using a pencil, and then moving on to a ball-point. One of the girls in my class got a fountain pen, and was asked to not use it by the teacher, as she ended up smearing the ink. This isn't going to make much difference, but if you try writing with an unusual implement, your notes are going to suffer, as you're focusing more on how to write than on what to write.
The second point experience could come into play is with Hogwarts itself - how to write/structure essays, what are the important things to focus on, and help with revising. If your parents ever helped you revise, you might have noticed it can be easier for them if they are familiar with the subject matter themselves - it allows them to rephrase the information in the book to ask questions, rather than just read it out to you, and ask you to fill in the gaps. Example:

You also have the child having been raised around magic, so magic might well be their first port of call.

It might not seem like much, but if your first response is to use magic, you'll get more practice. Dipping into fanon - a shoe lacing charm.
Ron casts this at least twice a day, sometimes he flubs it and needs to go again. Harry just bends down and ties his shoelaces, because it doesn't save any time really. It gives Ron that extra 14 practices at swishing every week. It is probably minor, but it would be habit forming.
This also links back in to experience - do you really think Hogwarts has a class on utility charms? Did your high school (because that's what Hogwarts is, based on age) teach you how to brush your teeth, comb your hair, tie your shoelaces, and so on?
Mine didn't - it was expected that I knew how to do them, because my parent/guardian/s would have taught me how to. So the little personal charms like that could just be things that muggle-raised kids don't ever get shown, unless they pick it up from a friend.
*EDIT*
Also, as Xandrel said, howto use the Floo, Knight Bus, what is Azkaban, and so on. These little snippets of knowledge - when to tip, when not to tip, should you assume the police are going to be nice, can you wee in the street without going on the sex offenders list, can you carry your fishing knife without being arrested, is applause polite and correct here, and so on.
*/EDIT*

Inclusivity.
I don't like soccer. I don't really like most sports, although I enjoy watching roller derby, but I have picked up enough (about football, golf, and maybe rugby) to be able to talk about them. But nobody near me plays gridiron, nor is it televised, so I don't have any real chance to learn about it.
Drop me in an American town, where people talk about how Jim scored a big two-pointer last night, and not only would I not understand what they meant, but I wouldn't really care. It's just some people I don't know playing a sport I don't know the rules to, against another team that I guess I don't want to win because it would make the people around me sad?
I could probably start caring, if I went to games, and looked into it, or if my new friends I'd never met before who all seemed to know each other explained it to me properly, from scratch, and I bit my tongue and didn't complain about rules that made no sense to me...
See where I'm going?




All that said, I don't think there's much difference. Voldemort, Lily, Harry and Hermione are all muggle-raised. Three of those are known to be exceptional. Harry, on the other hand, got

Bearing in mind that Harry never really understood Divination, got visioned by Voldemort during History of Magic, and saw Hagrid getting arrested during Astronomy...

In real life, that's the GCSE (and probably whatever the American system uses) equivalent of
A - 1
B - 5
C - 1
D - 1
E - 1


(It looks like the A* was introduced in 1993 in GCSEs, but we know that O's have been around for longer, so I'll ignore it)

Which is more than enough to go into A-levels. Getting 5+ A-C results also puts Harry in the top 39.9% of male students in 1996. Also, he got 49 GCSE points, nearly 50% above average. I won't say it makes him an incredible student, but it doesn't look like he's only scraping by.

 

When you have homework over the holidays, it must be nice to have a whole network of people you can casually ask to look over your work. There's access to libraries at home (for fairly wealthy people at least), possible experience with magical creatures/plants, familiarity with career options, hearing spells in everyday use, a host of littler things.

Realistically magically raised children should come to Hogwarts with a significant edge over their Muggle-raised counterparts, especially with the existence of helicopter parents - I know mine would have bought the entire first year booklist and made me go through them like a year in advance, and would've made me learn the words and intent of every spell they used around the house. They'd probably lose that edge long before OWLs though.

There's one area that I think Muggle-raised children would do better in on average: essay writing. All of them (barring exceptional circumstances) come to Hogwarts with several years of essay writing experience in a standardized environment. Magically-raised children on the other hand would run the gamut from wealthy kids who can afford tutelage year-round to those whose parents have to teach them themselves between everything else. Not all parents are good teachers (or good essay writers themselves), and even among the good ones I don't imagine a lot of them set their children an essay or two every week (like I had in primary school). Again that edge should be lost long before they write their OWLs.

As for quills, I don't think Harry ever feels that using one is uncomfortable or messy, and I'm not surprised. I really don't see why magical quills would be as difficult to work with as Muggle ones, with all the charms that can be placed on them.

...wait, does the magical world have a (non-Hogwarts) public library system?

 

I think that would simply be a case of literacy and numeracy in general. There will such an incredible amount of variation between magical-raised children. Of course, I would expect quite a few half-bloods to take advantage of the muggle school system to get their kid's literacy and numeracy up to scratch on top of saving themselves time.

 

According to Word of God, "They can either go to a Muggle primary school or they are educated at home. The Weasleys were taught by Mrs. Weasley."

Magical Children should have a significant head start in any subjects that do not require "foolish wand waving", if and only if their parents educated them adequately. In the start of the books, Ron was tricked by his brothers into thinking "Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,turn this stupid, fat rat yellow." was a legitimate spell. Arguably, the quality of education will vary across the pure bloods, so there might not necessarily be an educational advantage of being a pure blood.

The true advantage pure bloods have over muggleborns, as pointed out earlier is that they see magic as a way of life and understand how various aspects of Wizarding culture work.

 

Weasley are the equivalent of country hillbillies that are home-schooled. They just also happen to be a family of incredibly intelligent people, for the most party, so they can individually go far.

 

I think you guys are misremembering the level of writing expected from primary school kids. Any "essay" they may have written will be a long paragraph at best.

 

And the quality of writing expected at primary school is pretty minimal, its certainly not going to prepare you for handing an essay in to Snape or McGonagall.

 

By Primary Six I was writing full page, 5+ paragraph essays with clear introduction, body and conclusion.

 

Calm the fuck down Granger.

 

What? It's hardly exceptional (warning: pdf) for primary education. Admittedly I don't know about standards in the nineties.

 

Eh, realistically while most kids at that age are supposed to do rudimentary essays 5 paragraphs introductions/conclusions which I remember being constantly repeated (Don't knnow about Nineties either). That's not exactly the kind of essay say Snape would deem good, and he definitely wouldn't have gone over the basics say if one the poorer purebloods didn't know it. So, yes muggleborns would have an incremental advantage like someone said earlier it'd be gone long before OWLS

 

There's a gulf between the high minded wording of the curriculum and what actually happens in schools. At primary level students don't do anything on their own: your hand is held through any "essay" you may have to write, with each paragraph being essentially spoon fed to you by guiding questions, templates, etc. The finished product looks like a small essay but the process of getting there is much more like answering a series of smaller questions.

I remember the one time in year six we were told to write an essay from scratch on a subject the class almost rebelled at how overwhelming the task was. In the end the teacher had to write a series of bullet points on the board that essentially became the structure of the essay, breaking it down into a series of smaller tasks.

Incidentally, a similar point holds for secondary school. Everyone always talks about how Hogwarts lacks an English class and that's a serious problem for composition skills, but it doesn't seem so different to the Muggle world. Essay writing as a skill isn't really something you learn in English class, which is (or was, pre-Gove) more about reading literature and media than technical writing skills. Rather you learn essay writing in the contexts of your various other classes like history and geography. The same seems to hold for Hogwarts - they have history, and they write essays for their other subjects too. I'm not convinced that a Hogwarts' 7th year would be any worse at essay writing than a Muggle peer.

 

Maybe I just went to a better school than most.

 

I know my primary school was considered one of the best in my area. Part of the reason it was so good was the children are always relaxed. When we took an exam with the exception of year 6 we were never told about it they just slipped them in. My mum was told that if we knew and stressed then they were doing their jobs wrong. Bearing this in mind I remember being really worried about essays when I started high school because I'd not done anything like it before, or at least called it an essay. With my Primary school's policy its entirely possible I did it without realising.
On a magic vs muggle debate the lack of an English course shouldn't hurt their basic writing provided the spelling and grammar is highlighted/corrected on their work. It would be their ability to find meaning in obscure literature and wordplay that would suffer. Then again I would expect any Slytherin worth his salt to be able to outfox a Gryffindor or Hufflepuff with double meanings and implications.

 

Not merely better than most. My school was better than most: small class sizes, no behaviour problems, eager kids, lots of extra-curricular activities and an average year 6 SAT level of 5, which indicates you're about a year ahead of the national average.

Yours sounds like some kind of myth straight out of a teacher's wet dream.

 

Or maybe I just went to a better school than most, seeing as we stopped writing essays as answers to a list of questions in like Primary 3.

 

Yeah, its lovely for you that you got to go to an amazing school - presumably either random chance, or your parents deliberately choosing to live in the catchment area. But most folk don't, they go to a school where essays aren't even mentioned at primary. They do exactly as Taure outlined above, and essentially write short essays, but they're never called that. And the normal length of a piece of work is a couple of jotter pages, no more.

Most folk aren't getting any real education in how to write an essay until secondary school, and then that education comes in history and geography, or modern studies, or even in science classes. Not in English though, they expected us to know how to write essays, we never actually got taught how to write them for English.

So the point is that your experience is so far from the norm as to basically be an anomaly. Its not even within the parameters that most folk would assign to a good or bad education. Taure sounds like he went to what I'd describe as a 'good school'. I went to a rubbish primary school, where class size average was 32 and the only extra curricular on offer was a lunch time bible study on a thursday.

The only person I know who's experience at primary matches what you're describing went to a private primary. Maybe you did, and just aren't saying, or maybe you got really lucky and got to attend the only state run primary that hits private school standards.

But to bring this back to the point of the thread, maybe you'd have been better prepared for Hogwarts than the average home schooled wizard raised, in terms of your basic academic skills. Much like, I'm sure, Justin Finch-Fletchley was. But someone from a normal primary school? Not so much.

If there's a culture of home schooling in the wizarding world, then there's likely a lot of resources out there, a lot of older people with experience who'll be quite happy to talk your ear off about what you're doing wrong or how they did it in their day. So those who are educated at home before going to Hogwarts probably aren't as badly off as someone who, for example, is home schooled by their parents until High School in the real world. I don't think the situations are analogous at all.

 

I did go to a private primary, and pretty much everyone in my social circle went to a private primary. That's skewing my judgement, I know. It's naive of me but I'd like to believe that most children enter secondary school with a solid basic grasp of composition.

As for homeschooling, my point was more that it's not standardized at all, and much like in the real world not all parents will make perfect use of the resources available to them, not all of them are good parents, and not all of them were the brightest at school themselves.

Come to think of it, could Hermione possibly have been in secondary school? She turns 12 the September she starts at Hogwarts.