The following weekend, Harry discovered one of the most immediate and tangible benefits of his involvement with Hermione’s study group.
He had approached Lavender Brown with some embarrassment about the topic of wizarding hair-care products, but she had eagerly taken him under her wing and answered all his questions in detail.
On Sunday afternoon, Lavender and Parvati performed a “makeover” on him in an unused classroom and introduced the young Slytherin to the wonders of Sleekeazy.
When he entered the Great Hall on Monday morning, it was with the first perfectly coiffed hair of his entire life.
Jim laughed at him, but Snape and Draco both nodded approvingly.
Greengrass and Davis were visibly impressed and asked him to call them Daphne and Tracey, respectively.
By the following Tuesday, Hermione’s study group had grown.
Justin Finch-Fletchley and Susan Bones had joined, along with Anthony Goldstein and Padma Patil—though Padma made a point of sitting as far from her twin as possible.
Harry wondered whether magical twins tended to run either extremely hot or extremely cold: practically sharing a brain like the Weasley twins, or constantly at each other’s throats like the Patils and the Potters.
He remained the only Slytherin interested in the group, which was probably for the best.
Their sessions split time between reviewing course material and discussing the relative merits of Muggle and wizarding cultures.
The Muggle-borns and Muggle-raised were learning a great deal about the wizarding world, while the Purebloods were discovering that many of their assumptions about Muggles were wildly inaccurate.
All of them were improving noticeably in their magical skills, though Neville continued to grow frustrated by his lack of progress with wandwork.
The second session also answered a question that had puzzled Hermione since the start of term: what did early education look like for wizarding children? The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
She had quickly realised there were no wizarding primary schools, yet all her Pureblood and Half-blood classmates could read and write several years above the level of most Muggle children their age.
The answer, of course, was magic.
Anthony Goldstein, a Half-blood who had lived abroad for several years, explained the concept of “educational potions” to the Muggle-raised members of the group.
As the name suggested, these potions instantly imparted knowledge in a specific field of study.
The number and scope of such potions were limited, as they were difficult and expensive to produce.
It was easiest to create them for languages.
Students who took Ancient Runes in third year began with a regimen of potions granting fluency in Elder and Younger Futhark, with more obscure runic scripts coming later.
Anthony had taken a potion at age seven to learn German when his father accepted a teaching post at the University of Hamburg.
He said it tasted terrible and left him with a headache that lasted a full day, but when he woke the next morning he was completely fluent—albeit with a distinctly nineteenth-century Prussian accent.
Wizarding Child Services provided a few free educational potions to all British Pureblood and Half-blood children starting at age six.
By the time they reached Hogwarts, these children could read, write, and perform basic arithmetic at a level comparable to a bright Muggle student who had completed their first year of secondary school.
Understandably, the Muggle-raised students were annoyed to learn they had spent six years in Muggle primary school when the same results could be achieved in days with the proper potions. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Anthony explained that the potions had significant limitations.
There was one for basic arithmetic, but most wizards seemed unaware of higher Muggle mathematics such as algebra and calculus, or entire maths-dependent fields like engineering and architecture.
After all, who needed engineers when you could simply Transfigure materials and magically reinforce them regardless of structural integrity?
Arithmancy, a third-year elective, introduced elements of geometry and trigonometry, but only insofar as they related to magical applications.
There were also literacy potions that brought wizarding children up to the reading and writing level of an eighth-year Muggle secondary student, but the vocabulary and syntax had not been updated in over a century—which explained why Pureblood children who socialised little often spoke with such oddly formal patterns.
Any potions beyond the basic ones for literacy and numeracy had to be purchased privately at considerable cost.
There were many language options, but few for the natural sciences.
The most popular one, intended for those pursuing alchemy, granted complete knowledge of Muggle chemistry… as it was understood in 1893.
The physics potion was so outdated it was actively counterproductive, leading drinkers to believe fires were caused by burning phlogiston and that vacuums were filled with ether.
There were few potions for wizarding history and none at all for Muggle Studies.
Susan Bones, whose guardian was a high-ranking Ministry official, did not know who the current British monarch was, and none of the Purebloods had any idea how Parliament worked.
Finally, it was apparently impossible to brew potions that conferred practical knowledge of actual magic—even seemingly mundane subjects like Herbology or Care of Magical Creatures—which was why Hogwarts remained necessary.
The prevailing explanation for this limitation was that “Merlin did something, so we can’t make potions that teach magic.”
Understandably, both Hermione found that completely unsatisfactory.