jkr doesnt understand anything about america if she thinks the northern and southern states will share the same wizarding school lollll. like the south would have formed its own school anyways after, if not before or during the civil war?
hell east coast and west coast magic has got to be different (european settlers on the east, mexican/hispanic in the whole new mexico, arizona, cali area).
not to mention historically black wizarding schools would have absolutely been a thing bc african magic survived thru slavery hello??? not to mention under slavery and jim crow laws i highly doubt black children would have been allowed to study with white students. you could even make the assumption that white slavers forbade them for using their magic at all (african magic = dark magic and all that Fun Racism)
underdeveloped and struggling to thrive native american reservation schools of magic in the dakotas?
texas has to have its own school on its own school. like its just a given fact. TEXAS WIZARDING SCHOOL QUDDITCH (like texas high school football #texasforever)
and obviously you have the elitist new england schools which everyone assumes is the pinnacle of american magic education lol
The U.S. would have tons of day schools in every region and zero live-in boarding schools.
The U.S. simply doesn’t have the same history of live-in “public schools” that England has and they make no sense at all in an American context.
PLUS all the stuff listed in this post.
J. K. Rowing has zero understanding of American culture or history.
The thing is, America is so heavily colonized that there’s no way the magic here would look similar at all to a European or British wizard. First off, you’re telling me Aztecs, Hopi, Seminole, and Lakota peoples (to name a few) would all have the same wizarding traditions as each other? No, I do not buy it. There would have been a substantial diversity between larger tribes.
Now we have first contact and you’d have Spanish and Mesoamerican magical traditions interbreeding heavily into probably a pretty solid fusion. The French tended to trade openly in the Northeast, and likely wouldn’t have assimilated as thoroughly as the Spanish but more so than the British who tended to just go “ours now, you leave.”
Then come waves of immigration, including the African Diaspora/the slave trade and focusing heavily in the south and northeast. Alongside that, you have French Canadians (Acadians) moving down the Mississippi into Louisiana and giving it a heavy French and Caribbean influence. You have Scotch and Irish immigrants moving into the Appalachians where (in some places) they’re in close contact with Cherokee and similar tribes, and in others with slaves. We can assume those groups would trade magic thoroughly amongst themselves in the few hundred years of living in close contact. You have Latin American immigration coming up through the south west and bringing their Mesoamerican/Spanish hybrid magic where it would be informed by Creole traditions formed by hybridizing French, African, and Native techniques along with the dominant British traditions. The Midwest tends to be Scandinavian, but again their magic is influenced by people they would have had trade with such as plains Indians and French trappers in the north.
Then, of course, Chinese and Japanese schools of magic coming into California where it blends with traditional Mexican schools. You have Puerto Rican, Italian, and Jewish immigrant communities living in close contact with each other as well as whatever hybrid Dutch-British-African hybrid is going on in NYC. That’s not even getting into more recent waves from Vietnam, Laos, and the Middle East, for example.
What I’m saying here is that not only would American magic look like an unholy hodgepodge to a European wizard, but there would be regional variations within the country that would be almost impossible to even work around.
I mean, say what you will about the French and British, but they’ve spent most of the last thousand years in close contact with each other and you can assume that French and British wizards and witches would probably at least know what their magic looked like. We’re talking now about cultures spread across the entire globe taking up residence in one area where they’re now surrounded by people with entirely different traditions. After a few generations, there’s going to be a lot of adaptation and adoption of techniques to the point that your grandparents wouldn’t recognize your wandwork because you’re now using something adapted from a Hmong style with a distinctly Norwegian flare and youre casting it with Incan words.
I mean Jesus, just look at the variations in American food from region to region if you don’t believe me.
I believe that looking at disability residential schools would provide a good idea of magic schools being set up, though magic is inherited much more strongly than deafness, which would affect parts of how this would happen. Modern figures state that around 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.
I’m familiar with the history of Deaf residential schools. They were originally started by parents of means in the Northeast/New England.
The story of the first school for the deaf is fairly well known. Dr. Cogswell had a deaf daughter, Alice. He and several other parents of deaf children raised funds to send a preacher, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, to Europe to learn a method for teaching deaf children. He returned with a deaf Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, and together they taught Deaf children at the first established school, funded by wealthy white parents of white deaf children.
More schools were started by other groups of wealthy white parents of white deaf children in New England. Due in large part to Edward Miner Gallaudet, son of the aforementioned Gallaudet, the American government was successfully lobbied to donate land and funds for a school, which continues on the original plot to this day.
In the south, it was quite different. Due to the distance between people due to agriculture, especially for white people of wealth, most wealthy parents (likely all white) of deaf children hired a live in tutor for their child. (Helen Keller’s parents used this method. She was deaf-blind but that did not affect how she gained education as much as that she resided in the south.)
Eventually residential state schools, funded primarily by the government (I’m fairly certain federal, though I don’t know if states funded them) were founded to provide education to every child of the type the school educated (Schools for deaf and blind were common, while most other disabled children were considered unteachable and sent to institutions or kept at home.) Due to the distance across the state, the schools were residential.
These schools were segregated, which caused for the development of very different Deaf cultures and sign languages. Eventually schools were integrated, which caused a strong adjustment period for those from the non-white school, as they had to learn essentially a new language and new appropriate ways to interact.
For most of their time, these schools taught trades appropriate to gender and not being able to hear or communicate with most people. For deaf students mattress making, broom making, and working printing presses were common for boys. Sewing is the only occupation I can remember off the top of my head for girls.
Recently, especially with the introduction of federal law mandating the “least restrictive environment” (and boy is that a hotly argued topic between local school and Deaf school), residential schools are becoming less attended. Most children are going to local schools and being educated there (with a variety of ways to do that), though many cities have a city deaf school that is a day school.
So, I would assume then that many magical children would be educated at home or would be unrecognized by their muggle parents (especially while young, also common for deaf children). They may also have been considered disabled or possibly possessed or similar (religion was very strong all across the USA then). Residential schools would have been founded later when it seemed there were generally enough students to warrant it (surveys were often done before starting deaf schools). I expect these schools would have been regional (one school for the entire US is quite absurd). They would have distinct methods, cultures, styles, and so on.
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