Wizarding Business Skills: Why Fred And George Learned Them At School

I’m rereading Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. This volume has the first mention of  Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, the joke shop that twins Fred and George want to set up. Their mother wishes they would focus on their schoolwork and eventually join their father and older brother Percy at the Ministry. Admittedly, both parents are not crazy about the unethical testing methods they use for their products, but Molly is also furious about the low number of OWLs they got(I’m guessing that’s Year 10 in Muggle terms) - she knows they aren’t dumb, she just wished they would pass their subjects. Interestingly, neither parent threatens to stop their Quidditch playing. 

But although they never finish their last year at Hogwarts( neither do Harry and Ron), are they really an academic failure? I don’t think so. 

Think about the skills they need to start up and run their business - skills they learned mostly at school in the years they were supposedly stuffing around.  

Firstly, there are the general business skills everyone needs to run a small business: research and development, marketing. Those are skills Fred and George definitely possess. They would certainly have learned the R and D across subjects, probably especially in Potions, the wizarding world’s answer to chemistry. No doubt Snape would not have been impressed if they played around in class with the school’s ingredients, but they would have learned there, if anywhere, how to experiment and test. Their marketing skills are their own, I think, judging by the huge success of their business in Half Blood Prince. 

Then there are the skills they would need to create their products. Potions definitely comes top of the list there, along with Herbology. They really would have to be very good at both those subjects to be able to make pretty much any of the items in their shop, along with remedies in case anything goes wrong. Thank you, Professors Snape and Sprout! 

Charms would certainly be useful in such things as their joke wands that turn into rubber chickens, complete with squawk. Unless they were perfectly capable of acing this subject, there are many items they couldn’t make. Thanks, Professor Flitwick! 

Transfiguration? Oh, yes! How about their Canary Creams that turn you, temporarily, into a giant canary? I doubt Professor McGonagall would be impressed with this use of her subject, but that would be where they learned it. 

Astronomy? That might or might not come into it, but the wizarding world seems to use it more like astrology than what we think of as astronomy, and some spells have to be done, say, at the full moon - I bet they were good at that too. 

Also, Defence Against The Dark Arts would help with understanding what might be too dangerous to use. 

Their spectacular exit from Hogwarts does suggest that they absolutely knew about pretty much every subject they studied, and how to...misuse them? 

There is already a joke shop, Zonko’s, which they use during their school years, probably in the course of their R and D as well as for fun, but theirs is better. 

I’ve stuck to the basic subjects as we don’t know what electives they chose, but I think we can assume they were very good at school - they made the best use of it for what they wanted to do with their lives.

So, whatever Molly might think, Hogwarts did very well for her sons’ careers.