j-j-j-jenny-and-the-cats:

standbyyourmantis:

cepheid-variable-star:

patroklov:

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.

Reblogging for commentary, because beyond the sheer disrespect of treating all of Native America like it was homogeneous and religious traditions are nothing but story material, this is 100% true. Folklore (which the Potter books heavily incorporated) is wildly different in New England than it is in Louisiana or the Southwest or the Pacific Northwest. 

Not to mention that the U.S. has a population nearly five times the UK, so would need at least five wizarding boarding schools even without the differences in magic in the different regions of the country. We don’t usually have boarding schools, so there would probably be portkey systems in place like busing for rural students at regular public schools (day schools outside the U.S., I think?).

And even ignoring all of that, I have never heard of a U.S. school having a house system in place. We’re much more likely to set up two rival schools even if it meant much smaller classes, and then one would be crummy and overcrowded and the other would be very nice somehow, because of how our schools are funded by property taxes instead of a general fund. If we did have houses, why would we have four instead of two or five or three? American schools DO have cohorts structured around student interests such as medicine, agriculture, general advanced placement, arts, etc. with pathways in smaller cities and magnet schools in larger ones. Why wouldn’t magical schools do the same?

What JKR has really done is just pasted a few decorations from widely different Native American cultures onto Hogwarts and called it good. This is terrible world building.