Oh, and just thinking about this some more, I suddenly realized *smacks forehead* that I have experience with the crazy ways of prefecture! I have no idea how it works in the UK (I'd guess it's probably different on a school-to-school basis, actually), but in my school, we voted for the prefects, and the teachers did as well, but their votes were worth a lot more than ours. So what happened is that you got these guys who were the more 'known' kids, because nobody would vote for someone they'd never heard of. The kids weren't really great leaders at anything, they were just middle-of-the-road, ordinary kids, who would get decent grades and be good at maybe a couple of sports or something like that. The Head Boy & Girl were usually the most popular students, but they had to be 'good' popular students, involved in lots of sports and random societies and things. Having really good grades wasn't necessarily involved (The Supergeek of the year was always a prefect, but the rest of us geeks who mostly just kept to ourselves, were always passed over @:) ) So, the prefects weren't really model citizens at all, just ordinary and easily recognizable, and most of them weren't responsible at all but were regular trouble-makers, and the Head Boy & Girl would always present a clean, decent image to the school and the teachers and then get totally trashed on the weekends... :)
So, er, I guess my point is, it's all well and good to expect Dumbledore & co to really recognize the merits of the people they're appointing prefects, but school things are always kind of arbitrary, and remember, the good folks at Hogwarts don't have the benefit of being able to read in detail about the lives of their students, and thus might not know more than the surface indications of 'oh, he's a good kid...comes from a good family', or whatever.
Also, re: Draco - would Lucius have stood for him not being made a prefect? I guess this depends on your Lucius interpretation - he might kick up a stink about it, or he might just use it to goad Draco in the way he uses his taunts about Hermione...
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Date: 2004-11-14 06:20 am (UTC)So, er, I guess my point is, it's all well and good to expect Dumbledore & co to really recognize the merits of the people they're appointing prefects, but school things are always kind of arbitrary, and remember, the good folks at Hogwarts don't have the benefit of being able to read in detail about the lives of their students, and thus might not know more than the surface indications of 'oh, he's a good kid...comes from a good family', or whatever.
Also, re: Draco - would Lucius have stood for him not being made a prefect? I guess this depends on your Lucius interpretation - he might kick up a stink about it, or he might just use it to goad Draco in the way he uses his taunts about Hermione...