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I don't know if it's a plot hole per se, but when do they learn maths and science? If they' at Hogwarts for 7 years, and they only learn magic, when exactly do they learn the usual subjects? Are they just stupid because they don't learn them?
Isn’t there a class named ‘Arithmancy’? I always assumed it’s math for wizardkind.
I just had a look about it and it doesn’t seem to really be much maths. It seems that it’s more about magic in numbers rather than actual maths. I only glanced at it so maybe I’m wrong.
They don't. That's all considered Muggle stuff that they don't need to know because they can just magic their way through life.
While I think that can be explained away with the idea that the magic is so OP they don't actually need to know science. To use the Rowlings own tidbit as an example, why bother with toilets when you can simply magic away your shit.
And that also leads to what IMO is the biggest plot point nobody really thinks about. That there's a secret society of magic users who almost exclusively use magic, and the "muggle" society has no idea of its existence.
Think about all the things we've discovered. Electromagnetism is pretty much magic, we figured that out. Atoms are pretty much magic, not only did we figure out atoms we figured out what atoms consist of. Einstein predicted black holes, something so out there that even Einstein doubted his prediction, we later discovered and modeled it. We can literally come up with absolutely insane ideas and then come up with ways to prove or disprove those ideas. There's no chance we wouldn't figure out the existence of magic and a secret society if we saw glimpses of something that makes us go "hmm, that's interesting".
You could argue that they use magic to hide magic from us, but they'd have to know about what we are doing to make sure we don't accidentally stumble into discovering magic. But Arthur Weasley makes it pretty clear wizards don't understand how our world works. They don't know what we're doing so their secret society is literally at the mercy of us not just noticing it.
So the secret of society pretty much exists on the premise that we're too stupid to figure out Magic, but smart enough to create the society we have.
Not defending anything in particular. But at least in the books themselves it is explicit that magic is not a thing to figure out. You're either born capable of accessing magic or you aren't. A muggle can't reason their way into acquiring magic. The book's entire universe is based on the divide between those forced to exist within the confines of natural laws (muggles) and those capable of bending and breaking said rules to basically achieve whatever (wizards).
I'm fine with that. I'm not saying we should be able to "aquire" magic. I'm saying we're somehow incapable of even acknowledging its existence. If muggles can't perceive magic then what's the point of keeping it a secret.
Obviously that's not true because not only could Dursleys see magic but it was used on them, thus magic is observable and muggles would be trying to harness it because they wouldn't know they can't.
So it also somewhat makes sense why they'd have a secret society. But to keep it a secret you need know what the muggles are up to so they wouldn't discover your secret. You need something like an intelligence agency to keep track of muggles and intervene if they get close to the secret.
But you don't know how the muggle world works, so you don't know what the muggles are doing which means you can't intervene if they start to discover magic. If you can't prevent them from discovering magic why haven't they discovered magic?
That agency exists. It was Ron's dad entire job description.
That's exactly my point. It was his job to know and he barely knew anything. If there was someone trying to verify the existence of magic Ron's dad wouldn't be able to do anything about it because he wouldn't even understand what that person is doing.
I think it is sort of like the CIA, just because they have power it out rules any need for reason. They just obliviate everyone indiscriminately.
I think like the vast majority of them are just dumb and some are like savants. Everyone other than like a couple people in the book are just copying magic routinely. Only Snape and a few other characters are cooking up any new magic theory.
That would explain a lot of the nonsense in their society