Harry Potter: the Ministry's Wand-Breaking Policy Is Bizarrely Unjust

Summary:

• When a student is expelled from Hogwarts, the Ministry breaks their wand so they can’t use magic anymore.
• At the same time, homeschooled kids can use their wands beyond Hogwarts, which makes no sense.
• Even captured Death Eaters’ wands are never destroyed, meaning the Ministry considers school dropouts more dangerous than terrorists.

Thanks to being stuck in the Middle Ages, the wizarding community in Harry Potter is still largely guided by some weird and severely outdated laws. While some of them are relatively harmless, others just make zero sense no matter which way you look at them — and the Ministry of Magic’s wand-breaking policy is in the second category.

The Ministry Must Not Break Ex-Students’ Wands

In Harry Potter, the wizarding education works about the same as in the Muggle world. Early on, we learn that while most parents send their kids to study at Hogwarts, others prefer to homeschool them. It isn’t frowned upon and is considered an adequate practice, considering the kid in question successfully passes exams.

To reiterate: there is a legal option to have one’s kid study magic at home, beyond Hogwarts’s boundaries, for which they’d need a magical wand. However, if a student gets expelled from Hogwarts, their wand is broken by the Ministry representatives.

Effectively, an underage student can use their wand outside of Hogwarts if they don’t study there, but can’t use it if they used to study at the wizarding school. This doesn’t make any sense at this point already, but it gets worse — and we’re not even talking about the Ministry destroying someone else’s property on its illogical whim.

Captured Death Eaters’ Wands Don’t Get Destroyed

Sirius Black, Bellatrix Lestrange, and many other Azkaban prisoners got their wands back after they’d escaped from the prison. We’re not here to question how they even managed to retrieve said wands from the Ministry’s grasp, though that’s also pretty suspicious; we’re here to wonder why, for Merlin’s sake, were their wands left intact.

Correct us if we’re wrong, but the Ministry of Magic destroys the magical wands of Hogwarts dropouts — but doesn’t destroy the wands of convicted Death Eaters.

Somehow, yesterday’s students are considered more dangerous than terrorists and murderers, and while the dropouts lose the option to use magic entirely, the criminals can easily get their original wands back and continue wreaking havoc and death.

How does that make any sense in any way, shape, or form? Oh, and by the way, if we were expelled from Hogwarts with our wands broken, we’d simply beeline to the Ollivander’s and purchase a new one before the Ministry morons catch up to us. So even in what it does, the Ministry of Magic is ridiculously incompetent, as always.