We have discussed how the WC is old and needs to change my question is how. This was brought on by a discussion on reforming the UN. Another useless organization. Or is it?
Do you do get rid of the SC position?. Or have wizards vote for them. DEMOCRACY BOY!!!!. Bare in mind the SC is feared and is the reason why the WC IS FEARED. Luccio implies that as long as the SC stands wizards will win the RC war no matter what happens to the wardens. Do choose a Merlin who is weak but good at politics? How will you hold the WC together? If the SC is now weak.
Do you give little talent membership? Will they vote?

Whatever form the reformed Council took, it would still have to look a lot like the current one to function at all.

The nasty, inescapable fact is that in terms of magical power, 'are men are created unequal', and all women too.  Almost anybody, per WOJ, can learn to do a little magic in the Dresdenverse.  It would be a lot of hard work for say 90-95% and not much result, probably not worth the trouble and risk.

The remaining 5-10% or so include your moderate talents, the Kim Delaneys, the Binders, the Victor Sells types, the hedge casters and mid-rankers and a few with some serious voltage.  Some of them are super-good at some specific subset of magic, like Mort or Binder, but not so much at the rest of it.  Of course most of this 5-10% have no idea of their own potential power and never try to use it or train it.  But they could do it, potentially, and some of them could do it enough to be useful if they knew it.

But only a tiny fraction of that 5-10% of the human race is remotely at Wizard level.  The WC is made up of several thousand people, but that's out of several billion people in the world.  Grant that not every Council-potential candidate gets found and trained.  Let's say there are three or four potential Wizards for every one that gets identified and trained.  Let's say there, oh, maybe 30,000 or 40,000 people on Earth who could, potentially, become a Council member with the right training.

Forty thousand out of eight billion is one person in 200,000.  Plus, that's probably over-generous, there probably are fewer potential Wizards than 40,000.

If you open up the Council to all practitioners, you create an organization that is both too big to function and too weak to do anything, and would inevitably end up dominated by the Wizard-level players anyway.  The gap is just that big.

Likewise, the Senior Councillors are already technically elected by the overall Council.  But if the Council elects a weak SC...then the Council itself is hamstrung in dealing with their enemies and restraining the bad players among the magical community, too.  The Council might reasonably elect a merlin who is not the absolute 100% most powerful Council member, if he had other useful talents or abilities.  But they would still need to pick someone in that general ballpark.

The way the WC works arises in much because of the realities of how magic works, and how the supernatural world is organized.  A reformed or replaced Council is probably going to end up looking at least a lot like the current one, maybe with some new blood and new policies, maybe some changes on the margins.

I could imagine, for ex, that the Council might permit the larger supernatural community to elect representatives to speak for them on the Council, not full members, but associates of some kind.  Things like that.  I could see a reformed Council being somewhat more 'open' about its doing, at least among the magical community, more willing to listen.

But it's still gonna have to be the White Council, probably from necessity.

Justin thought he could teach 2 at a time; and we don't really know the upper limit.

As I said, Harry and Elaine could probably each manage 2.  Three at once, maybe, but that would be pushing it.  It takes years to properly train a Council-level Talent, and do it right, and it takes a lot of attention.  This would be especially true in the case of Talents who had either already started to go wrong, or who had the native personality to be difficult.

The more apprentices you try to train at once, the less attention each one can get, the less personalized the training can be, and the more chance of something important slipping through the cracks.

The Craftmaster/Apprentice model is usually thought of as 1:1 or at most 1:few, but the "vocational school" model shows it doesn't have to be that way, and the WC's "baby warden school" in the desert showed that more-modern "team teaching" methods can get better than a 2:1 student:teacher ratio (though I don't think we have a precise number).

The vocational school model doesn't work for Wizard training.  There isn't just a set specific body of skills that have to be taught, at that level each student has their own requirements and has to be taught individually.  It's also about philosophies, attitudes, the moral aspects of magic, proper habits of thought and necessary self-discipline.  It's about the master recognizing the particular weaknesses and strengths of the student, it can't be entire standardized.  What worked for teaching Molly would fail teaching someone else, and vice versa.  What worked well for Harry would not have worked well for Elaine, and vice versa, because of their different personalities and native strengths and weaknesses.

I'm sure you could teach some of the basics in a group-class setting, but as soon as you started getting into the high-end stuff that model would fail.

The baby warden school was just that, all they were doing was trying to accelerate specific Warden training, not the overall training to make a Council wizard.  And even there, it wasn't doing as good a job as they would have liked, it was just necessitated by the war emergency.

"A few hundred a generation" (call it 400 for an estimate (mainly because the numbers work very-cleanly) is only an annual class-size of about 20 per year; but that's worldwide (and as you note, they will miss some).

But even if you assume just 20 a year, you still need at least 7 full Wizards to teach them, assuming 3 per master, 10 Wizards if it's 2 per master.  Some of those students will be hard cases who absolutely need the full 100% attention of a master, which makes it worse.  Harry does not have even 7 full Council level Wizards to do the teaching.  In practice, to teach 20 students would probably realistically need at least 10 Wizards to master them.

And that's just the first year.  A year later you get another 20, but the Wizards from last year are still teaching the first round of students, Harry now needs 10 more Wizards.  Let's be conservative/hopeful and say three years can turn a new student into a Wizard.  (I suspect it usually takes longer, but let's be optimistic.)  That means you need thirty full Wizards, with the right mindset and skills for teaching, to get 20 students a year through the process.  In the fourth year the first round of students 'graduate' and the first ten masters can take 2 new students each.

So Harry needs, at a realistic minimum, 30 skilled Wizards to teach 20 students a year for 3 years a student.  That's not ideal, that's minimum, ideally he would want twice that many to really do it right.

Plus he still needs the equivalent of a force of Wardens to be the enforcers, too.  That's separate of the teaching staff.

Molly is also specialized, though less-so than Mort.

Molly has specific talents, yes.  So does Harry and any practitioner.  She's still a full Council-level talent and has vast potentials Mort will never equal, outside his one narrow specialty.

Mort, however, is a world-caliber power... despite his narrow specialty, he's not a "minor" talent.

No, he's a major-level sub-Council talent.  His abilities by themselves are not sufficient to make him a world-level player.

Mort took down Capiorcorpus.

Harry tried.
Molly tried.

Mort did it.

No doubt.  It doesn't matter.  That fact that he's better than they are in that one narrow area doesn't make up for their vast superiority at the other 95%.  I'm sure Binder is better than Harry at his one specialty, too.  Victor Sells could probably teach Harry a few things about sex magic.  That doesn't make Victor a peer of Harry.

Etc.

It wouldn't be perfect -- far from it!

But Harry & allies & the Paranet -- making a concerted effort -- would already be doing more good the entire White Council.

Um...no.  The Council is still doing vastly more good at a large scale than they could do.

We see the Council's negative side because we see it through Harry's eyes.  His first encounter with them was them putting him on trial for his life for defending himself.  He hates the very idea of executing children for breaking rules they didn't even know about.  He hates the Council's elitist tendency, even as he recognizes the necessity of it.  He really really hates the Council's hypocrisy.

BUT...over the years Harry has reluctantly been forced to admit that a lot of the stuff he hates is necessary.  Also, the Council and the Church are the two main factors that have enabled civilization to rise as high as it has in the last few centuries.  The Council is the main reason why the average mundane doesn't believe in supernatural monsters anymore:  the Council has imprisoned/destroyed most of the worst of them, and forces the rest to keep their heads down most of the time.  The Council is the main force that kept the Red Court, the White Court, and some degree the Black Court from running unchecked.  The Enlightenment was a Council project that got somewhat out of hand.

Plus, of course, Kemmler.

Even Karrin had to admit, in a backhanded, resentful compliment, that the Council were running themselves ragged keeping the world from blowing up in the instability that followed the fall of the Red Court.

As frustrating and hidebound and hypocritical as the White Council is, the world of Dresden would be a far, far worse place without them.

WHY EVERYONE IS OK WITH DEMONREACH NOT HAVING A WARDEN
So when last did Demonreach last have a warden before harry got the job. The books imply at least 5 years. I have seen so say 15 years or more. Which is crazy, cause Demonreach is scary and powerful. All the major players seem to know about it. Yet none seem to be willing to attempt a power grap and take it for themselves in the years without a  warden. Mab in Changes claims Demonreach could have defended itself from the ladies and co. And BG implies that the Warden is a weakness thst can be used to get in the island being able to defend itself. NEMESIS’S plan
Stop theory time
What if in the early days the council always made sure their was a warden. But most candidates died trying to bound with it. Thosewere the lucky ones. Those who succeed ended up getting unstable. This could explain why no one rushes to fill the spot its more troble than its worth.

We don't know for sure, but personally I suspect it has more to do with Council politics.

Probably it has a Warden...most of the time.  But when one dies or retires (if you can), then the SC probably has to appoint a new one.  The sheer power and danger associated with the position means that they are probably going to be very careful about who they give it to, and it might be that the candidate has to be acceptable to Alfred as well.

So the appointment is probably very, very political.  It would likely  (I suspect) need to be someone the whole SC, or a large majority of them, can agree on.  Which might also mean that it needs to be someone that isn't a close ally of any one Senior Councillor and an enemy of another.  If Alfred has a veto that further narrows the list of possible candidates.

Also, the Council is made up of people with multi-century lifespans and the SC is mostly people who have been around for hundreds of years.  They take the long view, for good or bad (or for good and bad).  Most of the time, so what if the island goes a few years without a Warden?

If things are calm, no major threats visible on the horizon, it might not seem like a big deal to the SC if the position is empty for five or ten or twenty years, while they figure out who to appoint.  It might matter if something Nasty suddenly brews up, but that's the exception, and 300+ year olds know it.  Most of the time they'd be right not to sweat it.

A twenty-year gap to a SC member is approximately the same as an eight month interim would seem to a typical mundane human (assuming 400 year Wizard spans and 75 year typical mundane spans).

Anyway, that's my guess.

I'm pretty sure the WC, as currently constituted, is going to fall.
I suspect this issue is going to be a big part of the reason why it does... and why in fact it should.

I don't think we know that, actually.  The Korean kid may have been a Molly-caliber mind mage, or even (potentially) stronger.



(Obviously, Molly became much more powerful with Harry's teaching; the Korean kid never got anything comparable)

He could have been, but the odds say he wasn't, because Molly-level Talent is rare.  Any given warlock, just a matter of odds, is more likely to be a local menace than a major threat to the world.

As for a Council/Parenet larger alliance, it's tough to set up because the Council is set in their ways and don't trust Harry and his associates, and the plan won't work without the Council involved.

Other people have theorized that Harry himself, and his allies, could form the nucleus of an "advanced studies" program for the Paranet's more-powerful talents, without ever involving the WC. 

No, they can't.  Or at least, they can't on any useful scale.

Training the Council-level Talents is a full-time task.  Harry could train maybe one or two at a time, Elaine maybe one or two at a time, Molly one or two at a time if she could get free of Winter.  Harry doesn't have many other allies who are powerful enough and skilled enough (and who have the right mindset for it, which is very important) to train high-end Talents.

Trying to train more than a handful at a time is a good way to end up with a major-league warlock, or a trainee who isn't up to the Council level because of sloppy training.

The world probably only produces a few hundred potential Council-level Talents a generation, but that's still way more than Harry and his allies could possibly train (and restrain) on their own, even if they could identify and reach them all.

Harry could be one instructor, Elaine another.  Morty is highly-specialized, but within his specialty is White-Council caliber.  He might be able to entice Molly to teach.  Etc...

Nope.  Mort is highly specialized, and that's just not good enough.  A dozen minor Talents don't add up to a Wizard, even if they're all as good as a Wizard in some specialty.  There's also the social and political elements to consider, too.

And then there's the nasty part, which is inescapable.  Even with good training, some of the high-end Talents will still end up going bad.  Some Talents might need to face the carrot and the stick both to be persuaded to stay and the strait-and-narrow, or even to accept the training from the teachers.  When that happens, somebody has to be the heavy and enforce the rules, or kill the new warlocks.

Which means you still need the Council and the Wardens.  If the Council falls and the Paranet rises to take its place, to do that job they more or less have to become the Council...which they cannot.  They are minor Talents, they just aren't powerful enough to take the Council's place.  Whatever took the place of the Council would have to gather in the majority of the Wizards and the more they did what they had to do, the more they would start to look like...the White Council.

If the Council falls, its replacement has to be more or less the Council 2.0 or something along those lines.  The Parenet just can't do it.

The White Council take death as the first and only option for Warlocks, they seem incapable of putting in the resources to locate young wizards early and their policy of masquerade means that there is no public recognition of the problem.

Realistically, the WC doesn't have the resources to put in.  They're incapable of it in the literal sense of the word.

There are only a few thousand Council-level Wizards.  Not all of them are psychologically or temperamentally suited for teaching.  Of those who are, many of them already have apprentices, potential Council-level Wizards who need a lot of training and a lot of attention.

The vast majority of warlocks are minor Talents.  They have power, and learn to use it and abuse it and it devours them.  They becomes dangerous threats to the people around them, to their local communities, etc.  But they just aren't powerful enough to be major threats to the world on their own.

The kid the Council executed at the start of Proven Guilty, for ex, was very dangerous on an individual level.  He was guilty of murder and rape, it was implied incest and other stuff.  He could have gone on to kill, maim, etc. a lot more people if not stopped.  But he would not likely ever have been a world-level threat.

The apprentices of the Council members, OTOH, are high-end Talents, and they can potentially be global-level threats if they go bad.  So the Council has to focus on them first.  Whatever resources go to the minor players have to come from what's left over, from cold necessity.

Now the Paranet and related groups might could fill some of the void.  They could identify budding Talents, maybe train/restrain the minor ones themselves and pass the major Talents on to the Council, if that setup could be arranged.  Maybe what the Council needs is a setup a little like minor league baseball, with groups like the Paranet as associated groups.  But it would be tricky to set that up.

But the Paranet is not really qualified to train the high-end Talents themselves.  That's why they would need to have an association with the Council to make the project work.

If it's about in utero magic exposure, even a purely mortal mother who spends a lot of time around a very powerful wizard would probably be enough to do it.

The upshot of what we've been told, and what's revealed in the books, is that magic is partly a genetically inherited trait, and partly a learned skill, and partly something else, all interacting together.

The genetic component can be inherited from either parent like most others, but whether that genetic potential will ever manifest itself depends to a considerable degree on environmental factors, again like many other inherited traits.  You can inherit a genetic predisposition toward getting addicted to a given drug, for ex, or catching a particular disease, but if you never encounter that drug or are never exposed to that pathogen, it won't matter and the effect won't happen.  You can inherit the genetic potential for better than 20/20 vision, but if something external damages your eyes, you may still be nearsighted.

You can inherit the magic potential from either parent, but it's a lot, a lot, more likely to manifest itself if you're exposed to magic a lot in the formative stages.  Which means the child of a magical mother is more likely to be magical than the offspring of a magical father, everything else being equal, because he or she is exposed to that magical activity during 9 months of pregnancy.  But as noted by peregrine, if dad is magical and mom is not, but dad is right there all the time slinging magic for some reason, it might improve the odds a lot.

But even then, it also depends on training and unknown factors too.  Harry and Molly, or Harry and Elaine, might have a kid, and that kid is getting high-power magic genes on both sides.  But if he never bothers to train and decides to spend his time becoming, say, an airline pilot or corporate lawyer, he'll never be a Council Wizard even though he almost certainly had the potential.

Magic also involves both the body and the soul.  For ex, when Luccio is transplanted to a new body, she still has all her skill and knowledge, she's still Wizard-level, but there are things she can't do as well because the other body has different potentials.  How the soul-side of it rises and passes on we don't really know.

I see the Sight as the CliffNotes version of the Soulgaze.

Probably not a bad comparison.  I tend to see it is 'inside/outside', that is, the Sight lets you see the outside of someone's soul, as when Harry saw Murphy's 'protective/angelic' imagery.  The soulgaze lets you see inside someone's soul.