So, last night my husband and I got into taking personality tests. In that we came across an article talking about how the house you identify with is actually a predictor of personality. As it was a little later than it should be, I waxed a bit philosophical. That the house you identify with says something about you does make sense to me as the way you see yourself is a big part of your personality. What doesn't make sense is the entire Hogwarts house system.
First, we have the fact that the whole sorting thing must be extremely scarring for a lot of kids. These are 11 year old children that are being called in front of a huge group of peers, many of whom they don't know, but all of whom they are going to be living with. Then, all their peers are told exactly how they are supposed to classify you. And even if there are supposed to be good qualities associated with each house, they have obviously also been equated with less desirable qualities. So basically, at the beginning of your adolescence, you are being given a label that you won't be able to get away from for the next 7 years. I can't see how that would possibly be problematic.
Then we have the fact that we are separating people into personality types and making people with the same personality spend all their time together. However, it turns out that people tend to work more successfully and get along better with people with different personalities from their own. Thus, from a productivity and peaceful living standpoint, Hogwarts isn't doing so well. Admittedly, I learned this specifically in relation to Myers-briggs personalities, which are divided into 16 instead of 4, so there will undoubtedly be variations in a house, but I still think it is a bit of a flaw.
In addition, when we get to the specific house values and how they really are portrayed in the books, we get to more nonsense. I am just waxing philosophical and I admit I am not putting too much into research in the books here (okay, so I haven't read one since the 7th came out and am working off memory from then), but there are serious problems with the supposed values of Slytherin and the apparent stupidity of most of the Slytherins. Ambitious, cunning, sneaky people are not stupid. Draco Malfoy is held up as a pretty textbook example of a Slytherin, but he exists constantly on the defense. He is acted upon and never really acts. He is really more the anti-Griffindor (a coward), than much of a Slytherin.
Voldemort I will accept as a pretty cunning and ambitious person, but it doesn't really make sense that his main source of followers were Slytherins. If anything, they should have been Griffindors; the brash, doer personality that should be really easy to manipulate and would move your cause forward rather rapidly. Slytherins on the other hand would move with you as long as you could convince them that it was in their best interest, but that is a tricky thing to keep someone thinking when that person is by nature always reassessing their own best interests. If you ask me, a Slytherin should have been Voldemort's main opposition as soon as one of them realized they could get the majority of 3/4ths of the population on their side by doing so. Dumbledore would be a good example of what a Slytherin should be, actually. Does it ever say what house he was in?
And yes, there was this longstanding rivalry going on between Slytherin and Griffindor that would make a Slytherin using the Griffindors more difficult, but if the majority of Slytherin were in fact as Slytherin as they were supposed to be, they should have fixed that rivalry to further their own ambitions, especially since the fall of Voldemort appears to have left the Griffindors in a good, powerful position.
And then we come to a thought I have expressed before and all pro Slytherin people are quick to point out that not all Slytherins are bad. Yes, I understand they are not all supposed to be on the bad side. But a disproportionate number apparently are supposed to be. Which to me means Hogwarts should have long ago questioned what exactly is happening in Slytherin that is causing this to happen. I mean, it is not like the admittedly crazy parents are actually raising these kids; the school has them the majority of the year from the age of 11 on. There must be something wrong with the system in that house if it is turning out a disproportionate number of evil people.
Well, this is enough time spent on Harry Potter for the day. And yes, I realize that the sorting problems are just the tip of the iceberg of nonsense in these books (I mean, you have a school of magic children with tons of magical adults and your solution to keeping the kids where they are supposed to be at night is having the one person without magic wander around a with a creepy cat to try and catch people out of bed? There has got to be a way to make some kind of magical alarm system).
