It is unlikely Hermione would have been in high school before Hogwarts. The cut off for school years in the England/Wales is the first of September (Scotland and NI are different). So Hermione being born in September 1979, and Harry in July 1980 would be normal for kids in a single class.

I'm born September the third, and one of my closer friends was born late August. The girl I got the bus back with was born on August 31st, and so was a school year ahead of me.

I can't vouch for private schooling, but I don't know of anyone in the public school system who was allowed to jump a whole year (doing it for one subject, commonly a language, wasn't completely unheard of), so it's not likely Hermione would have been moved up a school year, either.

That said, I do know someone who was (sort of) moved down a year - she was born on August 30th, and her parents worried she would be bullied for being one of the youngest... It backfired, because she was bullied for being held back a year for being stupid, despite that not actually being true. But she started her school year 12 months later than she should have done, so she was never really demoted.

Link to an article by the BBC. Sort of useful. Ish.

 

Definitely naive of you. When I moved up to secondary, I'd say that a full third of my year struggled with basic writing tasks. For example in history if they were given a couple of sources of information (a picture, and a short quote for example) and then to write the answer to a question with reference to those sources, they wouldn't have been able to. They'd have struggled to produce a written answer to "Describe your house" that went into more detail than "It has rooms."

My thoughts are that whilst home schooling is by definition not standardised, if it is normalised then that will actually lead to a degree of standardisation. It'll lead to parents 'swapping' kids for classes. Mrs Weasley handling the basic writing classes, and Mr Abbot teaching basic herbology, because thats what they're good at and they know their own weaknesses. It won't have been organised enough that they were forming schools. It'll have been small groups of parents with similarly aged children, or who happen to live in the same geographical area.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of biology and chemistry is featured in transfiguration and physics in charms. In my headcannon the more you understand what you are attempting to do the easier the magic is to perform, given we see 1% of what Harry and co get in lessons and deliberately miss anything the reader might find mundane. Again my head-cannon but it doesn't make sense for there to be a thousand different transfiguration spells, one for each unique application. Therefore I could see much class time being devoted to understanding what the spell is actually doing.

 

Yes, but I've always felt that there was no real need for wizards to study the sciences etc. They can impose their will on the world around them without an intricate understanding of it. They don't have to know the physics of gravity before they can make something float. So it doesn't really matter that Hogwarts leaves out those subjects, because they don't need the knowledge in the long run.

 

I would go a bit further than saying they don't need Muggle scientific knowledge. I would say that it's not even of academic value to them for its own sake. It would be like Muggle chemistry classes teaching phlogiston: a wrong description of the world of interest only to historians and philosophers.

Which in turn is why, while I agree with the above statement that understanding what you're doing enables the casting of magic, I don't think they would teach science at Hogwarts. It has nothing to say about what they're doing. Certainly the students don't need to understand the chemistry and biology of animals in order to transfigure them successfully. Rather I think they have to understand the way the spell works. Perhaps this would involve ideas such as Plato's forms, Aristotle's theory of causation, etc.

 

What I find most interesting is that in the first book, Snape is the only one to use any sort of logic puzzle in defence of the Philosopher's Stone. He's also, as far as I'm aware, the only one of the Hogwarts teachers who was raised in a muggle environment. That suggests to me that there are some benefits to being muggle raised, as as Hermione pointed out, most wizards don't have an ounce of logic in them.

We see this again and again over the course of the series; Neville's great-uncle dropping him out of a window, practically every wizard at the World Cup, Arthur Weasley's fascination with muggle items. It's like taking a Medieval era person and showing them a smart phone. No matter what their degree of education is, they're simply not equipped to understand it because they work with entirely different underlying assumptions.

So while I don't think there's any innate benefit to being muggle raised, there are certain situations where it would prove beneficial.

 

The lack of logic you've pointed out is surely only extant because in most wizards every day lives, there is a lack of logic. Stairs that move, doors that only open if you say please, houses that are physically impossible yet stand just fine thanks to magic. Logic isn't relevant to magic. And yes, Snape made it relevant by using it as a defence, but could it not be argued that the defence itself was actually magical. If you had sufficient magical skill you would simply be able to overcome the fire blocking the exit of the room, rather than having to rely on the potions.

 

That's not a lack of logic, that's just logic with different starting premises.

 

It's true that there are many forms of non-standard logics based on various axioms, from intuitionistic logic to fuzzy logic. They are all strictly speaking logics. However, in common usage, "logic" tends to refer to the type of logic that most closely represents what humans consider correct or valid reasoning i.e. classical propositional logic.

So yes, your statement is technically correct. "Wizarding logic" as a system of thinking based on axioms which are alien to Muggles, is still logic in the broadest sense of the word. But by making this technically correct semantic point, one rather misses the substance of the discussion and the point Mordecai was making, which is that the reasoning wizards use is alien to the way Muggles think due to the fact that the wizarding environment operates on fundamentally different ideas that fly in the face of classical propositional logic.

 

Exactly this.

 

I have no goddamn idea how Fred and George managed to convince Ron that "Sunshine, daisies..." was actually a spell. It's not spell-like at all. It's nothing like any spells (that we know of, at least). It's not even in the same language as 99% of spells. Did he just not pay any attention for the first eleven years of his life?

Though that raises the question of just what magic spells the average child would logically be exposed to in their formative years. Reparo is probably number one.

As for logic, what I was trying to say is that the magical world is not 'lol rAnd0m' - cause and effect are very much in play, things follow each other, and there's really no reason why a wizard would not be able to make headway on Snape's little puzzle if he put his mind to it.

 

There are a hundred ways to do things in the magical world. When something is messy there is a scouring charm, you could animate a brush to clean it, you could vanish the dirt and I'm sure you could all come up with other things. depending on the ability of their parents and how much they got out they could all learn different things. Just think how often you'd see something cool and ask how do I do that?

 

I mean unless there's some underlying translation, the spell that Tonks uses to pack up Harry's things has the incantation of 'pack' which is a plain English word. Assuming the Weasley as a whole are rather talented folk, they might be able to wordlessly cast spells while talking and directing their children, and so many appear to use English incantation spells. If Mrs Weasley waves her wandering at pots and brooms and says "let's start cleaning!" if you don't know better you might think that's an incantation. Same thing with any other animation charms she might cast to do housework, so how much 'real magic' are children likely to see in their own homes? There's certainly almost no dueling going on, and adults in a general sense probably aren't doing an awful lot of transfiguration at their houses.

Which probably lies at the heart of why most people raised in a magical household don't have a huge academic advantage over their peers, magic is in their lives, but is probably not taught to them any more than your average parent teaches about core academic subjects in mingle households. Admittedly even in the early 90s British parents were probably starting to need to get involved in helping their children do homework, but in the absence of government mandated school children in magical households are probably taught the basics: reading and arithmetical skills and maybe some history. They will probably never see their parents doing the kind of magic that is taught to first years (matchstick to needle, levitating charm, etc) because there isn't any need for the parent to use these abilities. And without them being used, why would the child have any reason to ask about them or try to learn how to do them?

TL: DR domestic magic isn't taught in year 1 at hogwarts, and there's very little reason why a magical family would have to use those magics or teach about them, so most magic raised people have no advantage in the academics because magic raised children have no general reason to be exposed to the academics of magic.

 

This is something i'd like to comment on. How much of an advantage is growing up around magic really? Is magic still magical if it becomes an everyday part of your life?

Someone mentioned a shoe lacing charm earlier, which i think makes for a good example. Using the spell probably doesn't actually save you any time. What it does do, is make magic do something mundane for you. It makes something that you can do in a few seconds with your hands into something that you do with a casual flick of your wand.

Now the question is: Is it more advantageous to familiarize yourself with magic in such a way that it becomes instinctive to do even the smallest thing with your wand or is it preferable to think of magic as an exceptional power?

I don't exactly recall the fic but i distinctly remember a quote that went something like this: "What kind of muggleborn witch are you? When did magic stop being magical for you?"

The point I'm trying to make is that muggleborns grow up with fantastical ideas about magic, they probably read a few fiction novels about it, it's something special to them, something extraordinary and amazing.

For wizard raised children magic is a part of their everyday lifes, it's just something that has always and will always be there. There's nothing special about magic because if you live with it long enough even the amazing becomes mundane.

I think one of the best examples is Ron's attitude towards school and learning. I can't imagine a single muggleborn student thinking that putting effort into learning magic could possibly be a chore. It's magic, for god's sake, it's amazing and special and I personally would be endlessly curious about it. I would try to figure out how it works, what the limits are, I would want to learn as much as I possibly can and try to push the limits of what this stuffed up society I just entered deems as impossible because this is magic we're talking about and magic is supposed to be limitless and special.

And that's where i think the true advantage for muggleborn lies. They might not understand the society they just entered, they might be clueless about some things that everyone else already knows and they might be slightly behind in magical training, but in the end it's their attitude towards magic that matters most. The will to learn, the endless curiosity about magic and to not just intellectually understand that they have access to something that muggles don't but truly know and feel what it's like to not live with magic and how incredible this power actually is.

 

Hmm, I don't remember reading about those enthusiastic Muggleborns you're talking about. In Hogwarts they read books, go to classes, have homework and end of term tests, all the while being surrounded by magic, to the point they get more and more used to it as time passes. The novelty would wear off in a couple of years, perhaps even less, for most. Also, it's magic, yes, but it seems pretty academic; and let's be honest here, even magic can become less cool if you have to power through tomes to get any better.

 

I suppose i might be inferring too much of my own personality into that. I was just thinking about how I would react if someone told me I could go to a magic school at my 11th birthday. I grew up with various fantasy books and I don't think I could name a single child that doesn't dream of learning magic and I don't see why it would be any different in the HP universe.

As for not seeing many enthusiastic muggleborn in the books;
I guess you're right but we really don't have all that much information on side characters in general. I really prefer to go by headcanon in this case and I just don't see why muggleborn wouldn't be more enthusiastic about magic than wizard raised children who see magic as a normal thing in their lives.

That said, Tom Riddle was muggle raised, Lily Evans was supposed to be one of the most brilliant Hogwarts graduates in recent memory and the same goes for Hermione.

In fact Hermione's enthusiasm on the first train ride is a prime example of what i mean. Yes, she was already a brilliant student in muggle subjects but when she learned why she could do things no-one else seemed to be able to do, she soaked magic up like a sponge.