12 Ways Going To Hogwarts Would Be A Seven-Year Waking Nightmare

One of readers' earliest introductions to Argus Filch comes from the first Harry Potter book, wherein the Hogwarts caretaker reminisces about the good ol’ days of discipline, when caretakers were encouraged to torture students. He even keeps chains and manacles in his office, "just in case." Remember, this is a thing he talks about in front of children. 

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Mrs. Weasley tells Harry and her family about the time when she and a young Mr. Weasley were caught taking a nighttime stroll on the Hogwarts grounds, and how Mr. Weasley still has the marks from his punishment by the former caretaker. That's... that's just child abuse, right?

Hogwarts is terrible at vetting its staff – assuming they vet them at all, of course. One of the darkest wizards in all of wizarding history was living on the back of Professor Quirrell's head for a year, and no one knew it. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, the real Mad Eye Moody was secretly being kept hostage for the better part of the school year, while an escaped convict and known torturer taught classes in his place.

The school also hired Gilderoy Lockhart, an incompetent celebrity with almost no qualifying skills for the position he occupied, and Dolores Umbridge, a soulless bureaucrat who took joy in forcing her students to self-mutilate by carving standards into their flesh. While Umbridge's appointment as the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was an act of the Ministry's, they play a large role in the implementation of vetting practices for what seems to be the ONLY major wizarding school in the UK. 

The Defense Against the Dark Arts position wasn't cursed. Hogwarts just needed a Human Resources department. 

There’s a reason the Forbidden Forest is, well, forbidden. It’s filled with dangerous beings like the acromantulas who would happily eat you, along with powerful trolls and giants who have been known to attack witches and wizards. Despite all this, Hogwarts regularly uses visits to the forest as a form of detention, bringing 11-year-olds face-to-face with these beings in the dead of the night.

If you’re one of those people who can’t go to the bathroom if there’s another person in an adjacent stall, then using the facilities at Hogwarts might be a bit of a problem for you. Some ghosts, namely Moaning Myrtle, are known to hang around while you’re using the toilet or even bathing.

Also, she makes no secret of almost checking out Harry Potter's downstairs wand when she gets into the tub with him. And, not to be crude, but think about the fact that a ton of these kids are in their teens, and away from their parents for extended periods of time. All attempts at bodily exploration, either by yourself or with a partner, could be interrupted at any given moment by some astral dude who died during during a Potions class gone wrong.

While the way the staircases move was never explicitly stated in the Harry Potter books, in the films the stairs literally swing from side to side, whisking unsuspecting students away from their common rooms and their scheduled classes to rooms that sometimes house giant, three-headed dogs, and sometimes worse things.

Rowena Ravenclaw designed the moving layout of Hogwarts, incorporating stairways with steps that vanished halfway up, probably to keep the nose-in-a-book Ravenclaws on their toes and the school nurse busy. Regardless, going to class every day would be an exercise in terror and unpredictability.

What do you do when you have a student who needs to be secluded once a month for the rest of the students’ safety? You install a giant tree that can beat whoever comes near it into a bloody pulp. Surely Dumbledore could have concocted a better plan to keep the werewolf Remus Lupin and the rest of the school safe. Perhaps the Room of Requirement or one of the many other rooms in Hogwarts could have served as Lupin's transformation arena. While the Silencing Charm is only described as being used on living beings, there must be some variation of it that could be applied to spaces. That way, Lupin could transform somewhere in the castle where he could be monitored by a staff member to ensure that he didn’t harm himself, which he often did during his earlier stays at the Shrieking Shack.

Instead, Dumbledore had the Whomping Willow brought to Hogwarts, and many a student and Ford Anglia were nearly destroyed because of it.