Dear students of Hogwarts.

I am one of you.

I am your friend, your classmate, your peer.

I am not your enemy.

I am not your rival.

I am not limited to a single personality trait. I cannot be defined so easily.

I will not live my life based on a decision made by a hat when I was eleven years old.

I am not the same person I was the day I stepped through those doors.

Neither are you.

We are people. We are changing. We are growing. We are becoming better each day than we were the last and we cannot do that if we are shut inside a box before we even reach puberty and told to stay there forever.

Too long our predecessors have stood in line and accepted the labels stamped on them. Too long they have allowed these labels to dictate the way they live their lives.

Even worse still, to dictate the way others live their lives.

Well into adulthood alumni of Hogwarts retain the prejudices they developed here. Hating peers who in other circumstances might have been friends. Every element of our society is run by those who walked these halls before us, and every day decisions are made based not on logic or reason but on presumptions and bias stemming from which house different people presided in.

How will you feel if one day you are rejected from your dream job because the person interviewing you was from a house rivalled with yours? Or because they made an unfair assumption about you without even giving you a chance to prove yourself otherwise.

What if they assumed that;

...because you were Hufflepuff you can't be assertive

...because you were Ravenclaw you must be uppity

...because you were Gryffindor you must be reckless

...because you were Slytherin you can't be trusted

Every day this happens.

Even after leaving here people of the same house clump together in similar jobs not because they are strictly drawn to those jobs but because they have learned to stay with their own, knowing the abuse they will face if they find themselves in a group that does not consider them a member.

Letting a choice made for them when they were still a child determine every moment of their life after.

It is a proven fact the segregation leads to rivalry, rivalry that in many cases can grow to hatred.

And the rivalries here have had a long time to grow.

Together we have seen the damage this can do. The divide that within our own lifetime nearly tore our world apart. The war may be over but 'You Know Who' did not create the spark that ignighted it, he merely fanned the flames. That underlying anger, that hatred and resentment was already there.

Passed down through the generations, each telling the next what to think, how to think, who to like, who to hate. Never giving any child the opportunity to decide for themselves.

It's no secret many slytherins were among the Dark Lords ranks and it is so easy to pass blame and judgement, but tell me, how many of us reached out to our peers and offered them our friendship? How many of us invited them into our circles and called them friends?

We didn't for one simple reason, it was not the done thing. Our parents had not done it, nor had their parents before them. Yet we claimed surprise when they closed ranks. When in their isolation they grew angry.

How much could have been avoided had we simply been encouraged to speak to one another, to share our differing thoughts and viewpoints in a supportive and understanding environment that gave everyone the chance to learn and grow?

How long will it take before the lessons of yesterday are forgotten and the same learned behaviour leads to the same anger, the same hatred, the same climax?

How long until war divides us again?

I'm not saying it will be easy. Old habits are hard to break.

But they can be broken.

They must be broken.

That is why I am proposing that we abolish the house system.

That we make this school a safe place where students of every background are encouraged to interact and listen to each other. Where rivalries are not formed before we even meet.

I am asking for this because I am a student of Hogwarts.

I am loyal.

I am clever.

I am brave.

I am ambitious.

I am all of these things and so much more.

So are you.

Thank you.