Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental? The houses aren’t arbitrary labels; they’re supposed to define your character. No real person fits into any one of those houses. Sorting students restricts their growth and causes them to develop into a House stereotype. And it’s the main cause of tension, hatred, and eventually war, in their world.
Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental?
My first, knee-jerk reaction to your suggestion was, “yeah!” Then I thought about it for a second and realized just how nice it might’ve been at that age to be given:
an identity to be proud of, based on something I was being acknowledged to be good at, and
a peer group of (literally) like-minded individuals with whom to share a common goal (winning the cup), camaraderie, and mentorship.
(As an interesting counterpoint, I actually did participate briefly in a house system around the age of 12 or so, but the houses were assigned randomly,
and IIRC the point system was purely athletic, so I didn’t give a damn about it.)
Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental?
Quite the reverse. The worst thing about our education systems is that they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from. I would absolutely love, even now, to have a sorting hat that can essentially weed out @5@#%s pre-emptively.
It is cruel and abusive to force people in an environment where they can not choose the peers they are willing to have in their immediate proximity. At least a sorting hat would help minimise the damage. “Us” vs “Them” is far, far better than “cruelest most powerful political animal vs most socially vulnerable”.
That would make more more sense if they sent those different types to different schools after sorting. At Hogwarts, they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from.
They can go to their own Houses, and do not have all of their classes together. The canon books, and MoR, spend considerable time focusing on inter-house interaction because that’s where the interest lies, but a Hufflepuff who wanted to avoid bullies of other houses could likely do so at least 90% of the time.
And as well as the reduction of social abuse via the reduced time spent with jackasses it can be a whole lot easier to tolerate social aggression if it comes from outside what you identify as the most local social hierarchy. If a Hufflepuff is insulted by Draco it may be a minor nuisance but if it was a high status Hufflepuff like Neville bullying them it would probably seriously damage their mental health over time.
As explained in some of the other comments, there are some good points about it, but it’s got some major flaws. One thing I really don’t like is that the teachers are House-identified. They’re players in the game, and it’s OK for them to arbitrarily punish kids from other Houses and show favoritism to their own. That’s like making coaches the referees. Hmmm, maybe that’s why the House Cup ends up getting decided by something as random as “Who can catch the golden mosquito first?”
An idea I had: Sort kids into the House that’s their greatest weakness/what they’re least like/the element they need most to improve. So the Hat would be like, “Well, Draco Malfoy, hrmmmnnnn...better be: HUFFLEPUFF!” “Harry Potter...unfamiliar to the Wizarding World, as like to eat an Exploding Snap as play it properly. If I don’t do something you might just cast some random curse labeled ‘For an Enemy’ on somebody without figuring out what it does first...better be: RAVENCLAW!” “Neville Longbottom...you could go faaaarrrrr, in Slytherin.” “Not Slytherin! Anything but Slytherin!” “Ooooh, a wise guy, eh? GRIFFINDOR!”
In each House, kids are taught the virtues of that House, rather than put there because they’ve already got ’em. And also, everyone gets Sorted each year, so you’re not pigeonholed once and for all as an 11 year-old (what, nobody who was a bully at 11 ever learns his/her lesson and becomes a better grownup?).
This system would help kids become more well-rounded. Just look how much MoR!Neville is benefiting from his “tuition” by Harry, who is the very model of a modern NiceGuy!Slytherin. Even in canon, Neville does seem to benefit in terms of developing courage and getting over his fears by being Sorted into Gryffindor when (in the canon Sorting process) he “should” have been a Hufflepuff. Plus, since everybody would probably be Sorted through more than one House during their school years, it wouldn’t divide the whole freaking society into four sects. Also, it would change things up a bit so one House that got the good Seeker when s/he was 11 wouldn’t always, always win the Cup.
One thing I really don’t like is that the teachers are House-identified. They’re players in the game, and it’s OK for them to arbitrarily punish kids from other Houses and show favoritism to their own. That’s like making coaches the referees.
It’s inevitable when you recruit all your teachers from the school alumni, which itself is more or less inevitable when you’re the only school in the nation.
I suppose you could rule that upon taking the job each teacher gets assigned to a new House at random other than the one they were students in (note that this would be a purely informal role, except for the four Heads), but I doubt it would be very effective and not counterproductive.
That wouldn’t work at all. Slytherin wouldn’t be Slytherin without any Slytherin kids there. Maybe it could be made to work with a lot of additional adjustments, but the result probably wouldn’t be much like the house system you describe.
That wouldn’t work at all. Slytherin wouldn’t be Slytherin without any Slytherin kids there. Maybe it could be made to work with a lot of additional adjustments, but the result probably wouldn’t be much like the house system you describe.
You don’t think you could take a bunch of young humans and mould them into selfish, Machiavellian, politically minded, corruptible schemers?
Of all the houses I suggest Slytherin is the most natural! Making Slytherins into Hufflepuffs, now that would be a challenge.
You don’t think you could take a bunch of young humans and mould them into selfish, Machiavellian, politically minded, corruptible schemers?
You could—“with a lot of additional adjustments”. You would to have to actually work at turning them into Slytherins, and doubly so if there are no natural Slytherins there at all to lead the way. And probably not everyone anyway.
You could—“with a lot of additional adjustments”. You would to have to actually work at turning them into Slytherins, and doubly so if there are no natural Slytherins there at all to lead the way. And probably not everyone anyway.
My claim is that most humans outside of fairy tales already are Slytherins.
I seem to have a somewhat more cynical outlook. Judging real humans by the criteria of the sorting hat would result in far more Slytherins than members for the other houses.
What makes the Houses have their particular character? the diktats of the Head? that 7th-year students remember what they were taught about the House the last time, they were Sorted into it, 3 years ago, and try to teach the others? I like the idea of putting people into Houses that they have the most to learn from, but then I think that you have to keep the House assignments permanent, or else lose the House characters entirely. (Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing ….)
It might be worth disentangling the effects of Sorting (possibly bad, should probably be moderated by mixed-House projects) and the effects of the House points system (entirely bad as far as I can tell).
The house point system might not be completely bad. It might encourage competitively minded people to work more if they might be lazy otherwise. Empirically in the real world this sometimes works. For a few years (not sure if still active), Yale and Harvard students had competitions about which could reduce energy per a capita more. When I went to highschool there was a fundraiser for raising money for foodbanks and each class competed to see which could raise more. There was also a “neutral box” for people who wanted to give but didn’t compete. By the end of the fundraiser the neutral box would generally have about an order of magnitude less money in it than the the grade box with the lowest amount.
Well, specialisation has benefits, and since the sorting is done by magic most people should end up happy where they are put. It’s not like they get different curricula or anything.
How did you choose your prior for anything done by magic to be done correctly? :)
Ending up happy doesn’t feel like a good goal. Maybe I’m being irrational. But it reminds me of the characters in Brave New World who said, “It’s Good to be a Gamma!”
Erm. Not really. It really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. It is not best to be Gamma. We don’t want to self modify to be super-happies, even knowing that we will reflectively endorse the change having become super-happies. The people in Brave New World are honest about their class being correct in a way that normal people aren’t being honest when they say it’s best to go to their school or root for their sports team or like their sort of art. That’s what I’m pointing out—the next step is to realize that the reply to a Gamma telling us it’s best to be them is “so what?”. We don’t have Gamma values so the fact they’re human shaped shouldn’t inform out values.
The original context was Oscar saying that the sorting hat will make people happy. I commented that maybe happiness isn’t the right goal—not a very helpful comment, frankly; Oscar’s comment was a fine contribution, whereas mine is tangential, nit-picking, and sounds like a criticism.
If being happy were your only goal, you might very well say, “Make me a Gamma!” “We don’t want to self modify to be super-happies” implies that being happy is not our only goal, which is the point I was (pedantically) making. So I think you’re agreeing with me more than you’re disagreeing with me. You’re bringing in more subtleties to the issue.
I can imagine that sorting students into universities or groups on Meyer-Biggs indicators or learning types could lead to some good things.
Also it could be that the founders of Hogwarts wanted to make sure that their society is made up of 4 main character and culture lines, which all work well together in the end.
When putting teams together for real world projects i enjoyed having all kinds of characters working on their respective area of interest.
What does Slytherin contribute? The Slytherin attributes are negative-sum. Whatever positive value they have is negated by the presence of opposing Slytherins; and they generate huge negative externalities.
Surely you’re overlooking Slytherin’s positive qualities as defined by MoR. Slytherin are focused on manipulating people, concerned with power, and quite cunning. If you want to keep fooling the muggles, have good PR guys, and keep alive the dangerous, secret lore that other houses would consider too evil (so we can use it to fight aliens), you need Slytherin.
It’s the only house that has consistently churned out people who actively work at defeating death!
JKR did, grudgingly, show us a positive-sum Slytherin, which is to say a pre-Riddle Slytherin; his name was Horace Slughorn.
Warning; essays on that site are addictive, and they will make you hate Deathly Hallows even more than you already ought to.
I’m not sure that it’s so much what Slytherin contributes as how best to deal with the Slythery people in society. Best to put them in school to keep an eye on them, then to put them in their own House to keep them from bothering the others. Even if you would prefer to be rid of them entirely (as Rowling, at least, might be), that’s not possible.
JK mentioned how Slytherin is not just the house of evil people, but that each evil person came out of Slytherin. I do not remember what other positions Slytherins have in Canon but we can surely come up with reasons to have such a house.
First it helps students to reach their full potential (at least in the theory that fiction is), second it provides a training ground to have people for the more dirty needs of society like leading in a war. Was there ever a mention which house Dumbledore went too?
Third it provides society with some training for how to deal with evil people. If there are none left society gets overrun by an outside force.
Fourth there is the value of not having the Slytherins poisoning other houses. Having a house of Bullies would be a nice add to the real world (till your research shows that a strong hierarchy forms in every social group.)
Fifth it gives you someone to contrast yourself against.
Sixth if Slytherins are more adventurous, prone to doing dangerous things that they are also the inventors of new things.
A healthy society needs some innovators, some bureaucrats, some workers, some people to provide Emotional support, some teachers and so on.
I remember reading some reasons for the House of Slytherin in Canon, but memory evades me.
Wormtail was Sorted into Gryffindor and turned out to be a bad dude. This seems to have more to do with Rowling’s desire to have him plausibly be a Marauder, than anything related to any aspect of his revealed personality. She’s very prone to that—the same rationale was likely behind making canon!Hermione a Gryffindor.
Dumbledore? Gryffindor, I’m afraid; it’s mentioned by Hermione on the train ride of the first book. He seems like so much more of a Slytherin, doesn’t he?
Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental? The houses aren’t arbitrary labels; they’re supposed to define your character. No real person fits into any one of those houses. Sorting students restricts their growth and causes them to develop into a House stereotype. And it’s the main cause of tension, hatred, and eventually war, in their world.
My first, knee-jerk reaction to your suggestion was, “yeah!” Then I thought about it for a second and realized just how nice it might’ve been at that age to be given:
an identity to be proud of, based on something I was being acknowledged to be good at, and
a peer group of (literally) like-minded individuals with whom to share a common goal (winning the cup), camaraderie, and mentorship.
(As an interesting counterpoint, I actually did participate briefly in a house system around the age of 12 or so, but the houses were assigned randomly, and IIRC the point system was purely athletic, so I didn’t give a damn about it.)
Quite the reverse. The worst thing about our education systems is that they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from. I would absolutely love, even now, to have a sorting hat that can essentially weed out @5@#%s pre-emptively.
It is cruel and abusive to force people in an environment where they can not choose the peers they are willing to have in their immediate proximity. At least a sorting hat would help minimise the damage. “Us” vs “Them” is far, far better than “cruelest most powerful political animal vs most socially vulnerable”.
That would make more more sense if they sent those different types to different schools after sorting. At Hogwarts, they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from.
They can go to their own Houses, and do not have all of their classes together. The canon books, and MoR, spend considerable time focusing on inter-house interaction because that’s where the interest lies, but a Hufflepuff who wanted to avoid bullies of other houses could likely do so at least 90% of the time.
And as well as the reduction of social abuse via the reduced time spent with jackasses it can be a whole lot easier to tolerate social aggression if it comes from outside what you identify as the most local social hierarchy. If a Hufflepuff is insulted by Draco it may be a minor nuisance but if it was a high status Hufflepuff like Neville bullying them it would probably seriously damage their mental health over time.
As explained in some of the other comments, there are some good points about it, but it’s got some major flaws. One thing I really don’t like is that the teachers are House-identified. They’re players in the game, and it’s OK for them to arbitrarily punish kids from other Houses and show favoritism to their own. That’s like making coaches the referees. Hmmm, maybe that’s why the House Cup ends up getting decided by something as random as “Who can catch the golden mosquito first?”
An idea I had: Sort kids into the House that’s their greatest weakness/what they’re least like/the element they need most to improve. So the Hat would be like, “Well, Draco Malfoy, hrmmmnnnn...better be: HUFFLEPUFF!” “Harry Potter...unfamiliar to the Wizarding World, as like to eat an Exploding Snap as play it properly. If I don’t do something you might just cast some random curse labeled ‘For an Enemy’ on somebody without figuring out what it does first...better be: RAVENCLAW!” “Neville Longbottom...you could go faaaarrrrr, in Slytherin.” “Not Slytherin! Anything but Slytherin!” “Ooooh, a wise guy, eh? GRIFFINDOR!”
In each House, kids are taught the virtues of that House, rather than put there because they’ve already got ’em. And also, everyone gets Sorted each year, so you’re not pigeonholed once and for all as an 11 year-old (what, nobody who was a bully at 11 ever learns his/her lesson and becomes a better grownup?).
This system would help kids become more well-rounded. Just look how much MoR!Neville is benefiting from his “tuition” by Harry, who is the very model of a modern NiceGuy!Slytherin. Even in canon, Neville does seem to benefit in terms of developing courage and getting over his fears by being Sorted into Gryffindor when (in the canon Sorting process) he “should” have been a Hufflepuff. Plus, since everybody would probably be Sorted through more than one House during their school years, it wouldn’t divide the whole freaking society into four sects. Also, it would change things up a bit so one House that got the good Seeker when s/he was 11 wouldn’t always, always win the Cup.
It’s inevitable when you recruit all your teachers from the school alumni, which itself is more or less inevitable when you’re the only school in the nation.
I suppose you could rule that upon taking the job each teacher gets assigned to a new House at random other than the one they were students in (note that this would be a purely informal role, except for the four Heads), but I doubt it would be very effective and not counterproductive.
That wouldn’t work at all. Slytherin wouldn’t be Slytherin without any Slytherin kids there. Maybe it could be made to work with a lot of additional adjustments, but the result probably wouldn’t be much like the house system you describe.
You don’t think you could take a bunch of young humans and mould them into selfish, Machiavellian, politically minded, corruptible schemers?
Of all the houses I suggest Slytherin is the most natural! Making Slytherins into Hufflepuffs, now that would be a challenge.
You could—“with a lot of additional adjustments”. You would to have to actually work at turning them into Slytherins, and doubly so if there are no natural Slytherins there at all to lead the way. And probably not everyone anyway.
My claim is that most humans outside of fairy tales already are Slytherins.
And Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws.
I seem to have a somewhat more cynical outlook. Judging real humans by the criteria of the sorting hat would result in far more Slytherins than members for the other houses.
Even if you take ’em when they’re kids?
If that were so it would defeat the whole point of placing anyone in Slytherin to become one. And my point would still hold for the other houses.
Yes, more or less. Unless there is some reason you want people to become better Slytherin.
What makes the Houses have their particular character? the diktats of the Head? that 7th-year students remember what they were taught about the House the last time, they were Sorted into it, 3 years ago, and try to teach the others? I like the idea of putting people into Houses that they have the most to learn from, but then I think that you have to keep the House assignments permanent, or else lose the House characters entirely. (Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing ….)
It might be worth disentangling the effects of Sorting (possibly bad, should probably be moderated by mixed-House projects) and the effects of the House points system (entirely bad as far as I can tell).
The house point system might not be completely bad. It might encourage competitively minded people to work more if they might be lazy otherwise. Empirically in the real world this sometimes works. For a few years (not sure if still active), Yale and Harvard students had competitions about which could reduce energy per a capita more. When I went to highschool there was a fundraiser for raising money for foodbanks and each class competed to see which could raise more. There was also a “neutral box” for people who wanted to give but didn’t compete. By the end of the fundraiser the neutral box would generally have about an order of magnitude less money in it than the the grade box with the lowest amount.
Well, specialisation has benefits, and since the sorting is done by magic most people should end up happy where they are put. It’s not like they get different curricula or anything.
How did you choose your prior for anything done by magic to be done correctly? :)
Ending up happy doesn’t feel like a good goal. Maybe I’m being irrational. But it reminds me of the characters in Brave New World who said, “It’s Good to be a Gamma!”
But it really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. The people in Brave New World really are happy and content.
Yes, I know. That’s why I said what I said. (E.g., your observation is taking the dialogue back one step, not forward.)
Erm. Not really. It really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. It is not best to be Gamma. We don’t want to self modify to be super-happies, even knowing that we will reflectively endorse the change having become super-happies. The people in Brave New World are honest about their class being correct in a way that normal people aren’t being honest when they say it’s best to go to their school or root for their sports team or like their sort of art. That’s what I’m pointing out—the next step is to realize that the reply to a Gamma telling us it’s best to be them is “so what?”. We don’t have Gamma values so the fact they’re human shaped shouldn’t inform out values.
The original context was Oscar saying that the sorting hat will make people happy. I commented that maybe happiness isn’t the right goal—not a very helpful comment, frankly; Oscar’s comment was a fine contribution, whereas mine is tangential, nit-picking, and sounds like a criticism.
If being happy were your only goal, you might very well say, “Make me a Gamma!” “We don’t want to self modify to be super-happies” implies that being happy is not our only goal, which is the point I was (pedantically) making. So I think you’re agreeing with me more than you’re disagreeing with me. You’re bringing in more subtleties to the issue.
I believe Lucas was trying for the “morality as a 2-place function” notation as in this post, but using different notation made this more confusing.
Tradition.
I can imagine that sorting students into universities or groups on Meyer-Biggs indicators or learning types could lead to some good things.
Also it could be that the founders of Hogwarts wanted to make sure that their society is made up of 4 main character and culture lines, which all work well together in the end. When putting teams together for real world projects i enjoyed having all kinds of characters working on their respective area of interest.
What does Slytherin contribute? The Slytherin attributes are negative-sum. Whatever positive value they have is negated by the presence of opposing Slytherins; and they generate huge negative externalities.
Surely you’re overlooking Slytherin’s positive qualities as defined by MoR. Slytherin are focused on manipulating people, concerned with power, and quite cunning. If you want to keep fooling the muggles, have good PR guys, and keep alive the dangerous, secret lore that other houses would consider too evil (so we can use it to fight aliens), you need Slytherin.
It’s the only house that has consistently churned out people who actively work at defeating death!
JKR did, grudgingly, show us a positive-sum Slytherin, which is to say a pre-Riddle Slytherin; his name was Horace Slughorn. Warning; essays on that site are addictive, and they will make you hate Deathly Hallows even more than you already ought to.
I’m not sure that it’s so much what Slytherin contributes as how best to deal with the Slythery people in society. Best to put them in school to keep an eye on them, then to put them in their own House to keep them from bothering the others. Even if you would prefer to be rid of them entirely (as Rowling, at least, might be), that’s not possible.
JK mentioned how Slytherin is not just the house of evil people, but that each evil person came out of Slytherin. I do not remember what other positions Slytherins have in Canon but we can surely come up with reasons to have such a house. First it helps students to reach their full potential (at least in the theory that fiction is), second it provides a training ground to have people for the more dirty needs of society like leading in a war. Was there ever a mention which house Dumbledore went too? Third it provides society with some training for how to deal with evil people. If there are none left society gets overrun by an outside force. Fourth there is the value of not having the Slytherins poisoning other houses. Having a house of Bullies would be a nice add to the real world (till your research shows that a strong hierarchy forms in every social group.) Fifth it gives you someone to contrast yourself against. Sixth if Slytherins are more adventurous, prone to doing dangerous things that they are also the inventors of new things. A healthy society needs some innovators, some bureaucrats, some workers, some people to provide Emotional support, some teachers and so on. I remember reading some reasons for the House of Slytherin in Canon, but memory evades me.
Wormtail was Sorted into Gryffindor and turned out to be a bad dude. This seems to have more to do with Rowling’s desire to have him plausibly be a Marauder, than anything related to any aspect of his revealed personality. She’s very prone to that—the same rationale was likely behind making canon!Hermione a Gryffindor.
Dumbledore? Gryffindor, I’m afraid; it’s mentioned by Hermione on the train ride of the first book. He seems like so much more of a Slytherin, doesn’t he?
He was a Gryffindor, o’ course, since that was the standard Hero House in canon.