Rambling Thought Regarding Harry Potter

Today, at the cafeteria, they were playing Harry Potter because I guess it's to get us in the holiday mood? Anyway, it reminded me of something I've thought since I read the first book. (I haven't read the rest. No insult on the series, I just got distracted. But if later book events make this train of thought completely non-applicable, well, oops. :-) Sometimes that happens.)

Ok, so the kids are sorted via the hat into Houses based on particular traits. They do everything in these Houses, and solidarity and competition is encouraged.

But they take the traits MOST likely to result in evil wizardry (ambition and cunning) and shove ALL of those people together into one House. Doesn't that seem like a recipe for disaster?

I mean, you've already got a House with a fairly disproportionate amount of evil-leaning wizards. And while not ALL ambitious people are likely to be evil, that does leave them pretty vulnerable TO the evil-leaning wizards running amock. And ambition is one of those traits that tends to make it easy to get in over your head.

It's like...prison really. In which some poor kid gets thrown in for drug possession or something and comes out with all this knowledge and ability to commit much bigger crimes. Only, you know. The wizard equivalent. You go in a little brat, and come out a Nazi.

And really, isolating most of the really ambitious people together in a system that promotes solidarity-in-ones-group and competition-with-others over anything else, just makes for another mess. If all the kids were dispersed instead of isolated, then they'd be more likely to focus their ambition on a wider area rather than just their own House.

It's like Hogwarts pretty much bred up the next generation of Voldemort's army FOR him. Yeesh.