Blue Exorcist needs to study up on having more girls in the cast.
Magic school stories are incredibly popular – and also really hard to get right. To this day, Harry Potter is still the best example of the genre I’ve seen, despite its many problems. So what’s up with this seeming contradiction? Why do both storytellers and audiences love magic school stories so much even though they come bundled with pitfalls? And what are those pitfalls, anyway? To answer all those questions, I’ll take you through the most prominent pros and cons of magic schools, so you can decide if this genre is right for your story.
1. Pro: Wish Fulfillment Is Through the Roof
Wish-fulfillment stories are those where characters experience things that the audience fantasizes about experiencing for themselves. Normally, wish fulfillment only applies to certain subsections of the audience, as individual tastes and values have a big impact. A story about helping Ruth Bader Ginsburg write a legal brief is serious wish fulfillment for some,* not so much for others.
But magic school stories have incredibly broad appeal when it comes to wish fulfillment. Nothing is ever 100%, but the Venn diagram of people who desperately want to attend a school of spells and sorcery and people who read speculative fiction is almost a perfect circle. Nearly all of us fantasize about getting our Hogwarts letter, whether we just want to attend classes or would rather campaign to reform the school’s abysmal safety precautions.
If you’ll allow me a moment of pure speculation, I suspect this is because school is such a commonly shared experience. Kids currently in school dream of learning cool magic instead of boring algebra. Meanwhile, adults often look back on school with great nostalgia, a carefree time before we had to deal with the stresses of grown-up life. Even for people whose school-experience memories are less than pleasant, there’s strong appeal in reimagining those grueling years as a time of magic and adventure.
This shared understanding makes it easy for audiences to think this story could happen to them one day. Oh, sure, in this book it’s Harry staying up all night in the Restricted Section, but he’s just a normal kid – surely it could be you next time!
2. Pro: It’s Easy to Add Novelty
Novelty is super important for a successful story. In fact, it’s one of the four critical elements that make stories popular! Audiences love cool laser guns and big scary monsters, especially if those things are presented in a way they haven’t seen before. The problem with novelty is that it fades, and eventually you reach a point where it’s harder to find a reason for injecting more.
Magic school stories have a big advantage here because the heroes are all students, explicitly at the school to learn about new things. Every time they go to class, you have a built-in justification for introducing something cool and new. Last term they learned about magical animals, but the audience has had their fill of unicorns, so now it’s time for a course about fairies!
This works best with protagonists who weren’t raised in the magical world. They didn’t know unicorns and fairies were real, and the audience can vicariously experience their wonder. You may recognize this from reading about a certain boy who lived. However, the extra novelty is still available even if the protagonist was raised by wizard parents. You just have to play up all the things they still don’t know or the things they had the wrong impression about. After all, most of us were raised in the real world, and yet we still managed to learn new things at school.
With this structure, you can keep adding new novelty even late in the story, ensuring the audience stays hooked. In fact, the main drawback is that you might get carried away and keep adding novelty when you really should be escalating the action, or you might just add more novelty than your story can support. That’s how you end up with worlds overflowing with cool magic items that no one ever uses.
3. Pro: There’s a Structure to Explain Magic
Explaining how magic works is one of the trickiest jobs in speculative fiction. Too much information gives the audience an exposition overdose, and then they’ll forget most of it anyway. Too little information leaves the audience confused and scratching their heads when they should be most excited. Hitting the sweet spot between the two extremes is no easy feat.
Fortunately, the same structure that allows extra novelty means magic school stories are in a great place to explain how magic works. That’s primarily what the characters are there to learn, after all. In a magic school, you rarely have the issue where the characters must awkwardly explain something they already know for the audience’s benefit. Instead, the audience learns along with the protagonist themself.
This allows you to set up a very simple and effective formula: The characters spend a few chapters struggling to master a new spell, going through a series of try-fail cycles, and then they use the spell to solve a major problem. Boom. You’ve taught the audience about magic and then shown why it mattered. Instant satisfaction.
The tricky part is designing a magic system robust enough that it can provide material for an entire school curriculum while staying interesting. A lot of stories try to do this by introducing an endless number of spells, but that’s a losing proposition, because the more spells you add, the greater the chance of unintentionally creating an over-powered combo. Instead, it’s usually better to introduce a limited number of effects and then have the characters learn to use those effects in different ways.
4. Con: There’s No Time to Learn Mundane Subjects
Now we’re onto the drawbacks of the magic school genre. While some of them are well known, others are more subtle, and the subtlest of all is a tiny little worldbuilding problem where magical students have no time to learn the basic foundation of knowledge most Americans take for granted.
Consider: There are only so many hours in the day, and if the characters spend most of them learning levitation and pyromancy, when are they going to study literature or history, let alone algebra? It doesn’t seem like Principal Archmage is likely to give them time off to do math homework.
That might not seem like a big deal at first, but it means that students at a magic school have little understanding of language, mathematics, or history. That’s bound to give them a very different perspective on the world than most audiences, which makes it harder to relate to them.
Solving this problem is tricky. One option is to have the characters split their time between magical and mundane subjects, but that still leaves the characters with an incomplete education, just not as severely. Every hour spent learning magic is an hour taken out of the school day – unless the magic is some kind of after-school elective, which isn’t what most stories are going for.
Another option is to work the magic into more traditional lessons. Perhaps the characters need to learn basic math in order to calculate the more advanced thaumaturgic equations, and they must learn sentence structure so they get their incantations right. This version is more seamless, but requires a very specific type of magic system.
5. Con: Classic School Tropes Fall Apart
Remember how one of the main advantages of magic schools is how familiar they are? That extends into classic school tropes like the unpopular nerd and the bullying jock, which you see in just about every magic school story ever written. People respond to these tropes, even if they never experienced them in real life, because they’re so common in stories about school.
However, the dynamics that make those tropes work simply don’t exist in most magic schools. For example, let’s take the unpopular nerd. The idea here is that a student who spends all their time on book learning will have reduced social status because they haven’t been building relationships or getting good at prestigious activities like sports. Maybe there’s even some resentment because the student is a teacher’s favorite.* All the knowledge they have might be useful later in life, but it isn’t now.
A magic school breaks that dynamic. All the nerd’s knowledge is suddenly useful because it lets them do magic. In a world where studying gives you the ability to conjure fireballs rather than recite passages from Moby-Dick, being a bookworm would be a mark of prestige.
Other tropes are similarly affected. It’s hard to believe that bullies would be the muscular jocks in a world where magic quickly outmodes physical strength in a confrontation. Similarly, characters are a lot less likely to skip their homework when it teaches them how to astrally project or shapeshift. That kind of immediately useful ability is simply far more engaging than real-life homework, which is at best something that will enrich our lives in the long run and at worst just busywork.
Fixing this problem requires carefully examining the tropes in question and deciding if you want to embrace the difference or try to make your setting more like real school. It probably makes more sense for your magic school to be a place where extensive studying is socially rewarded, but that’ll make it less recognizable to audiences. If you want that familiarity, you’ll need to modify the premise so it still fits. Perhaps your magic system is extremely physical, like Avatar’s bending, and so reading in the library for hours doesn’t count as practice.
6. Con: Students Shouldn’t Be Solving Problems
By far the most serious drawback of magic schools is that, almost by definition, the protagonist is surrounded by people far more capable than they are, be they teachers or older students. This makes it extremely difficult to justify why the protagonist should ever be the one dealing with dangerous threats.
You see this type of problem in any story about kids, but it is multiplied tenfold in magic schools. Schools are supposed to be places of safety. Even if that’s not always true in real life, audiences will expect it to be true in fiction. Teachers have a responsibility for their student’s safety; no way will they let the hero out of class early to duel the villain. And if the hero can’t solve the problem, they aren’t really the hero of this story.
Fixing this problem at the structural level is extremely difficult, so most storytellers try to solve it by arranging circumstances just right so the hero is forced to confront a dangerous problem despite the school’s safeguards. This can work, but audience standards are extremely high, so you’ll need an airtight explanation. Even if you manage that, it’s only something you can do once. The second or third time it happens, the story will be contrived no matter how well you explain it.
It’s also possible to craft a magic school that just isn’t concerned with student safety. Maybe the teachers are inscrutable knowledge spirits who care little for the affairs of mortals. The spirits are bound by an ancient contract to pass on knowledge of the craft, but they won’t lift a hand to stop the villain from turning their students into ensorcelled thralls.
This kind of setup makes it far easier to explain the protagonist’s thrilling heroics, but it’s also likely to damage the wish fulfillment that’s such a big draw for magic school stories in the first place. Once you make the school an ostensibly dangerous place to be, you can’t count on the audience wanting to be there.
There’s no universally right answer for solving this problem. How you do it will depend on what’s right for your story. That’s often the case when writing a magic school story; the same elements that make people love it also create problems. It’s a challenge, but if you’re aware of the potential hazards going in, you can decide what balance of beloved elements and storytelling practicality is right for you.
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Interesting Article, Oren.
I really like that you cite Works you critiqued for other things if they have positive examples of something :)
One on thing I need some clarification.
Why are nerd skills useless when not applied to learning magic? Or did you mean more useful with magic?
I ask that because I think most nerds (at least as far as i know) read for their enjoyment and not all are equally good an absorbing knowledge for enjoyment and work. Also i think that the pressure of having to learn something through reading might detract from joy of reading. So as for Avatar-based Martial-Mages I would guess that magic learned through tomes plays to the strength of some people and most still have to work hard. It’s just that in the latter case more nerdy types have an advantages of more jock-y (?) types.
Yeah, I’m kind of at a loss here and think I missed something. :(
I think Oren meant that with learning magic, spending more time with books is probably going to get you further quicker than being good at sports. That isn’t necessarily true for regular schools. And, yes, being an avid reader and being good at studying are not the same – I’ve always been an avid reader, but an average student myself.
Magic is usually much more connected to the mind than to the body, though (some types, like bending, clearly are not, but in most cases, mages aren’t exactly the most physical people). Nerdy types are more concerned about the mind than about the body, too, which makes a certain connection between being ‘nerdy’ and being ‘good at magic.’ I remember that the Spellcasting series (very, very, very old computer games) had a running gag about the people in the MCs dorm playing ‘Malls and Muggers’ the whole time, where there were accountants and lawyers instead of warriors and wizards. First of all, the magic users wanted to play games without magic (which makes sense when you study magic, I guess), but it’s also the idea that the attendants of a magical college would be a bit nerdy, just like students in our reality.
That makes a lot of sense. Very insightful :)
Also: Im a nerdy type to and was average at school – so i can related there :)
I also would expect a magic system in a magical school setting to be in more about studying than bending. To a combination could be nice.
I still would expect some cabable mages to be bad people but i honstly dont like that jock-y(?) types are often depicted as bullies – gladly not always.
In my fantasy world i made it that each mage has to find out how they learn magic best.
A school that teaches a variety of different magic systems could be quite interesting.
Following what Oren said about bullying; the magic of dragon slayers and warrior monks would be very fun to watch, as would their training & and a healer, who will go into danger unarmed, to rescue the fallen is obviously very sexy. Potion makers would have an unmanageable number of friends. But a mage who is slowly building the foundation of immense personal power while not gaining any immediately useful skills may have a hard time fitting in without any way to contribute to fun and shenanigans.
And if the magic school is meant for teaching heroes/adventurers, they could have the school structured to creating well-rounded teams with a decent mix of front-line and support mages, while also discouraging any one person from trying to become more powerful than any of their peers.
So just to be clear, I’m talking about tropes here, not necessarily everyone’s lived experience. Cay’s pretty much on the mark here as always, but to put it in my own words, the trope of the unpopular/bullied nerd who’s super smart and good at school work specifically depends on the idea that learning, say, chemistry isn’t immediately useful or socially prestigious until you graduate and become a chemist.
In a magic school, being good at magic is immediately useful and almost certainly a source of social prestige as well.
Thanks for the clarification. I missed that is about tropes. Sorry for jumping to conclutions so hastyly.
It could be at least mildly interesting to see the spellcasting nerds bully the poor martial jocks. I’m sure Gary Gygax would be proud.
Remember that this sort of school need not be just for magic
The movie Sky High and the webserial Super Powereds by Drew Hayes are about schools for superheroes
Psionics, dragon-riding, mech-piloting, adventuring in dungeons, etc… You can make your school series about almost any fantasy or sci-fi aspect
Yes, you can work with other ‘specialized’ schools as well. The “Please don’t tell my parents…” series also has a superhero theme (and a lot of the students at Penny’s school are superpowered one way or other). And in the “Magical Diary: Horse Hall” visual novel/life sim, dungeon adventures are part of the curriculum (they’re the exams).
I think one way that someone could keep the focus of the magic wonder and still have the students learn basic skills is to treat magic as an elective. The other classes serve to show as a foundation of “yeah, these kids are learning” but keep the focus on the magic courses. This would likely work best in a scenario where wizards/witches/sorcerers, etc would be expected to specialize in one area of magic. Put this on top of having potions as a chemistry course and study of magical creatures as a type of biology and you’re golden.
Further, if you expand the idea of “magic school” to include college then the fact that these students would spend more time on magical courses than general ed (esp those going for doctorates) makes even more sense. In this setting, you could also have an adult villain going after an adult student that lives off campus as well.
–NW
On #4, I always assumed that since kids can only go to Hogwarts when they’re 11, their parents would have spent all those other years teaching them the basics of English and Math and so forth.
I guess they would have some basics, but that’s more along the lines of ‘can read and write well enough’ and ‘can do basic maths.’ That’s not all you’d need to get along. Some people have rightfully pointed out that even muggle-born students do not have any chance to work outside of the Wizarding World after school – let alone those from magical families. They get taught nothing of regular life and nothing about technology.
I want a story about Ravenclaw kids sneaking out to attend night classes at the local college for things like chemistry, or engineering, or biology. (:
I have my MC take classes at the faculty of magic at a regular university. I Think that if you don’t have a masquerade, that makes more sense. You’d have people doing interdisciplinary work like magophysics etc; you wouldn’t have magic as this completely separate thing from other disciplines.
Yes, without the masquerade, it makes a lot of sense that regular universities would have a faculty of magic as well – or several, depending on how many disciplines there are in magic.
I thought one faculty, many different departments within that faculty. :-) Like the faculty of social sciences, faculty of natural sciences, faculty of humanities… each have a bunch of different departments.
I want to write a book about a teacher in a magical school who has to deal with the students’ shenanigans, a “traitor” among the staff *and* the school’s utterly appalling health and safety measures…
Something I think would make more sense in a lot of ways would be if it was treated like a military academy, as a university education rather than as a replacement for high school. This would especially address the largest problem, that there would be a good reason for the characters to be actively doing things, as they are actually adults who could thus be expected to contribute to the big problems that face their organization. If a crisis send them into the field with limited training, it would also largely make sense. I think the flaw here is that this would all be less escapist, which is most of the point.
I also think it would be interesting to see a science fiction version of this idea revolving around a group of trainees at something like Starfleet Academy. Which actually exists with Heinlein’s Space Cadet, but it would be nice to see a modern version without some of its problems.
It would make a lot more sense, but also mean that Harry Potter and others wouldn’t be children/teen stories, which quite some ‘magic school’ stories are.
You might enjoy Gunnerkrigg Court. They take students from any age but the place is basically a mad scientists paradise. The courts main goal is to do science to magic – which of course puts them at odds with magical creatures. All i can tell you with out spoilers is every single detail matters.
Yes, Gunnerkrigg Court is cool. Also a web comic, so you can look into it easily.
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1
I disagree quite a bit with 5. If students can sleep through a class that literally teaches how to make bombs, they can sleep through a class teaching fireball spells. If they can be dismissive towards a class that teaches CPR and other first-aid procedures, they can be dismissive towards magical classes.
Our real-world, “mundane” school knowledge isn’t inherently uncool or useless. If we focused only on the end results, everyone would want to know how to make cool stuff with science, or how to speak a second language, or how to play music, or martial arts. The problem, however, is that the process of learning is hard, slow and often boring. Which are all things that magic schools could also be – authors often go out of their way to make magic hard to learn. So yeah, I don’t think students in a magic school are going to be all that motivated towards studying, or any more respectful of nerds because of that.
I mean, maybe if you assume that magic is easy and produces results quickly, but it still is rare and wondrous… And there is still a big difference on how well students perform, even though everyone should be a lot more motivated…
I should also note that the trope of the bullied, socially inept nerds and the too-cool-for-studying kids isn’t necessarily a good representation of reality.
No, the trope is not a good representation of reality, but it is very common in all forms of media aimed at kids and teens or portraying them. There’s hardly a high school series or movie without the old ‘jocks vs. nerds’ trope and it has even moved into adult entertainment with series like “The Big Bang Theory,” which draws most of its jokes from nerd stereotypes and the ‘jocks vs. nerds’ idea. That means most forms of media dealing with school settings are using that trope to a certain degree and have for a long time.
That trope, as #5 points out, would however be actually turned around, because in a school for magic, the usual ‘breeding ground’ for the jocks, the sports teams, would play a very small role, if one at all.
The ‘jocks’ are not on top of the food chain in teen series, because it’s the natural order of things (as you rightfully point out, this trope doesn’t happen in reality that much). They’re on top of the food chain, because ‘being a sports ace’ is ranked higher by the general school populace (and in some cases even by the teachers) than ‘being a good student’ or ‘having a lot of unusual knowledge and skills.’ Their physical skills are marketable for the schools (where the team sports often play a huge role in school life) and thus they have influence. And that is, because their skills have actual use while in school, unlike being good at chemistry (unless the student in question is making drugs). The sports teams show immediate success, they can be celebrated. That way, the members of the team get prestige.
Now have a look at a magical school. Is it likely that they’ll have that fixation on body and physical skills? No, it’s not. Mages are (also a trope and a stereotype, of course) usually associated with mental powers, not with physical prowess. So the usual reason why jocks are important is not going to apply to magical schools. There might be some (such as HP) with team sports, but a lot more emphasize would normally be put on the use of magic. And that means that ‘classic’ nerd characters (which includes the ‘know-it-all’ type with the nose in a school book the whole time) would have an advantage and could be in the place which regular teen series reserve for the jocks. Perhaps they’d even have magical tournaments (less dangerous, perhaps, than the Triwizard Tournament from HP), where the best students of various types of magic compete.
I’ve been working on a Magical School genre in one of my story ideas.
The magic school (called a Scholomance) is basically a witch training center for witches discovering their powers, usually from mid teens to early twenties, with child witches considered rare. The Scholomance looks like an ordinary building, be they set in the city or in the countryside/wilderness.
The witches’ society in my fictional setting are modeled after the Queer community; with young witches upon discovering their powers leaving their homes, schools and families. The stay at the Magic Schools as a kind of permanent residence until they learn to manage on their own. They also learn mundane subjects like math and science.
Witches in my story are strongly egalitarian, diverse, progressive, and inclusive. One they all share in common is their great reverence for the mythical World Tree/Tree of Life, which happens to be the source of their powers.
Sounds interesting, but isn’t ‘scholomance’ an expression for a specific school led by the devil, where 13 students are taught each generation, but only 12 are allowed to leave, while the 13th must serve the devil? It might be a good idea to adopt another name in that case.
It does, but the name literally means ‘School of Magic’ from what I researched.
There are evil magic schools, which are folklorically known as ‘Black Schools’.
It was just a warning, in case you hadn’t noticed. If you know and still think it’s the best choice, go ahead with it. The premise of your story sounds really interesting.
The idea of an evil magic school actually sounds like a great story premise.
It also solves Con# 6: if the school is evil it doesn’t need to care about it’s students’ safety.
It does, but the name literally means ‘School of Magic’ from what I researched.
There are evil magic schools, which are folklorically known as ‘Black Schools’.
Naomi Novik has written a trilogy called ‘The Scholomance’ set in a magic school where the lessons are magically automated, rather than delivered by teachers, the students are constantly under threat of attack by monsters, and graduation involves forming a team and battling your way through a horde of the most dangerous monsters to reach the magic portal that is the only way out.
The reason students compete to go to this school is that the world outside is even more dangerous for young wizards!
Well, If so much of what we learn in school is useless, then there could be plenty of time for magic lessons by simply cutting out all the useless stuff.
I honestly feel like this genre has to be done very well, or else it’s boring and cliched.
Are there any Magic School works in which the protagonists are teachers? I think that would be a lot better use of the School of Magic as a setting. You still have the exposition mechanic and if the school year keeps changing, you have excuses to repeat exposition. The teachers are going to be adults, and the variety of students, students’ families, backgrounds and external events that affect the education system can all be excuses for bringing new stuff up. Instead of leading people to ask “How can this horrible faculty keep putting students in danger” the safety of the students is an additional challenge for the teachers.
The varied specialties demanded by the curriculum is a reason to have a magically diverse cast of main or regular characters. If you think about it, the student body of Hogwarts are just a bunch of British twerps, regardless of cosmetic differences. It’s the faculty that’s really diverse and divergent. I’d have liked to see more conflict and interaction among Snape, McGonagle, Lupin, Moody, Sprout, Flitwick & Trelawney and maybe some aldult perspective on why they keep Hagrid & Filch around. Maybe the pain-in-the-ass janitor is considered an invaluable aid to the problems of running that whole madhouse. And in another school, you could have teachers from all over the world teaching Chinese or African or Indian or Middle Eastern magical methods, traditions and philosophies. The rationale for a variety of skill sets and “classes” in an adventuring party is entirely Doylist – to handle a variety of situations, but the Watsonian rationale is often lacking or stretched to explain why a devout champion of the gods might be traveling and fighting alongside a power-seeking troublemaker who relies on demons or a bunch of career criminals. Why would someone devoted to healing and saving lives be BFF with a professional murderer? Unless they have been hired to teach at the same school, to give the kids a well-rounded education.
Maybe there’s an enforced neutrality policy, so factions that would be assassinating or going to war with one another in the real world can actually have a civil conversation in the faculty lounge. Persecuted witches could take a position on the faculty for protection, moralistic scholar-monks embrace the chance to set young people on the proper life path, and researchers & innovators want to take advantage of the funding and facilities to study & test theories, and supporters of unpopular factions or ideologies might welcome the chance to compete for recruits on a level playing field.
Basically, the Magic School setting provides a means for all sorts of character-driven conflict, a venue for competition and a common allegiance with shared stakes. You can’t give EVERY member of the adventuring crew a wife and kids back home to worry about, but threaten a classroom full of first-graders and every member of the faculty cast has a stake in the conflict. And you can still have the authority figures and confining structure if the cast is teachers, rather than students. You can balance stuff as well, by having teachers and students as equal participants in the stories (if not as equals themselves), so you aren’t trying to make mountains out of the molehills like “Who’s going to be captain of the team?” and other low-stakes adolescent nonsense.
I think a much more interesting story would be a bunch of adults trying to cope with the Chosen One coming through their school over a period of several years, with skeptics contrasted with devotees, not necessarily of the kid itself, but rather the ideas or authority that says this kid is Chosen. Believers of the prophecies fight over whether or not he is the fulfilment. Believers fight with skeptics who question the prophecy. Some will see a duty to prepare the Chosen One to meet its destiny, others a chance to nudge the Chosen One to put their own spin on how that destiny works out. Forget Harry Potter playing a made-up sport that makes no sense, I want to be in the head of Severus Snape, trying to cast magic spells with your neck bent backwards, protecting a kid in an already dangerous situation, from an unknown threat, while you’re the one who’s actually on to the villain, and meanwhile conflicted because the kid is the offspring of the people you loved and hated the most, and your own personal choices and redemption are wrapped up in events to come at which he’s the center.
The closest I’ve ever read is Pratchet, which was more a parody than anything else, and Wheel of Time, but in that one, the magic school was just one part of the story, and the educational aspect was only one small part of the organization’s purpose. Like if a high school or college faculty was more concerned with their political activism and research projects than their classes… so, you know, actually the most realistic depiction of a magic university.
That’s actually a great premise for a story. I don’t think there’s many stories about teachers in general (meaning the more or less regular life of a teacher – not a college professor or someone else ‘higher up,’ just your regular primary or secondary school teacher). A faculty room is bound to be the place where teacher who don’t like each other (or detest each other’s subject) have to mix. A room where teachers recover between classes (which, I imagine, could be pretty exhausting at a magical school, where you have to worry about more than cheating during an exam, with the students learning to bend the world to their will). A room where you have fractions which might vary from time to time, throughout the school year. Where alliances are forged and broken over extracurricula subjects for the students. And where the view of the Chosen One might, indeed, be much less favourable than among the students.
It would have done especially the character of Severus Snape a world of good, had the readers spent some time in his mind early on in the HP series…
Three remarks :
About 4) The Bartimeus trilogy does solve the problem quite well by making knowledge of trigonometry, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew mandatory to use magic.
About 5) Harry Potter also does the bully trope quite well. Malfoy is a bully who rely on his family relation and social status.
Besides I don’t really see why sports would not be cool in a world with magic. We have boats and planes and cars yet people who can run fast or swim fast are still cool.
Now onto my main point.
Please don’t use “algebra” or “mathematics” as examples of something boring.
Mathematicians are real people too.
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew aren’t exactly everyday subjects everyone takes in real life, so it would be pretty much like other classes taught in a magical school (if I remember it right, one of the additional classes Hermione took in the third book was some form of mathematics used for magic, too). All of those are not mundane subjects and will not give the students a leg into the non-magical world after they’ve finished their schooling. That’s the main problem with magic schools: they don’t prepare their students for a life in the regular world after school, which means the students have no other choice than stay in the magical world, no matter what they want.
In a magical school setting, I can’t really see how sports would have the same position as in the American high school (sports aces are less high up the hierarchy in the school systems of other countries). Keep in mind that regular high schools compete through their sports teams, some even have sponsors, which brings the school money. I think that in a magical school, magic would take that spot and there might be competitions (more or less friendly) between magical schools in which their students compete in that field. That doesn’t mean sports can’t exist or be enhanced with magic (see Quidditch in the HP books), but I doubt they’d normally take the same high position. It would bring a magical school far more prestige and be far more interesting to watch when the students show how powerful their magic is.
I do agree that mathematics aren’t something boring in general, although higher mathematics are pretty much alien to most people on our planet. I’m sure they’re highly interesting to mathematicians, though.
As a mathematician I get a bit sick of hearing every single person I meet (Every Single Person.) say something like “I’ve always hated maths” or “maths is soooo boooring”.
As a non-mathematician, I have to admit that maths are very hard on people who don’t have the mind for working with numbers and formulas (same goes for physics, though). That can quickly translate into a hate for mathematics. It might be how we teach maths to children more than the actual facts, but it is like that for a lot of people.
I have to take some issue with the idea that having a school that teaches magic automatically leaves you with an incomplete education, or at least that it leaves you with one that’s specifically more incomplete than any other type of education may be.
Now, Harry Potter is obviously not a good example, but in the real world you not only often end up being given a choice between different subjects, especially at higher levels (ie: Are you taking French or Latin, Art or Music?) as well as more widely diverging paths (ie Are you taking the Art branch or the Maths branch, each affecting which other subjects you do/don’t get and how much you’ll learn in them) but we also have many very different school systems, some of them with far less hours of school than the American one, a lot of which are still considered better.
There’s also the issue of history and such where most countries will emphasize their own and languages, which some countries barely teach while others expect their students to be at least somewhat fluent in 3, the list goes on.
Finland would be the best example, having 5 hour school days, breaks included, no standardized testing and little homework until highschool or the equivalent.
Conversely, most French students stay in school all day, yet I would highly doubt that they are somehow receiving a far better education than students in other countries.
There are also specialized schools in the real world where students receive an education tailored to what they wish/are expected to pursue after standardized education which still teach the required knowledge in other subjects (at least in Germany).
So, to summarize, education varies widely even on a local level without being necessarily better or worse, having more hours devoted to a subject doesn’t necessarily result in a better education and we already have specialized schools that could be used as inspiration or blue-print for magic schools.
As such, I do believe that it’s entirely possible to have magic schools without them necessarily leading to a incomplete education.
In a world where there is no masquerade you could even expand on that by not just having schools specifically devoted to teaching magic, but also have magic presented as an option in “regular” schools or even have at least some theoretical knowledge be part of the normal curriculum.
Well, most magic schools are clearly very focused on magical subjects and do not teach stuff like maths, English (for English native speakers), physics, computer science, etc. A school for, for instance, sports prodigies still will teach them at least a general curriculum of everyday knowledge. That means a student of that school who, for instance, flunks out due to receiving a lasting injury can still go into a regular job because they have the education for it.
Yes, in many countries, you can choose certain subjects and drop others, but what you drop is rarely something that is considered essential to education, such as maths and the country’s language. Often, it’s also more of a choice between a basic and an advanced course in your favoured subjects. All students in Hogwarts, on the other hand, will find it impossible to take any job in the muggle world after their time in school, even those who come from the muggle world.
I’m not saying a magical school wouldn’t cut down the time for some mundane subjects and, perhaps, drop stuff like music, arts, and PE, but it should be teaching at least the basics of some regular stuff as well.
I can’t help but feel like you have only skimmed my comment.
At no point did I claim that this is something that is commonly found in fiction.
I made it pretty clear that my issue is with the claim that a magic school is not possible without leaving the students with serious gaps in their general education, which is what you have claimed in your article.
That this is commonly done in fiction was never something I contended.
I have explicitly brought up specialized schools and different countries as an example of how education varies a lot and how it is entirely possible for a certain new or specialized subject to be taught while still giving children a rounded education in other matters.
(See also: second and third languages outside America. No they are not elective.)
That important things such as ones first language or a basic level of maths and sciences need not be cut to enable an education in magic, partly due to things like advanced/basic classes and varying subjects already being an existing concept that could free up time for basic education in another subject and prove that adding one or two subjects is entirely possible is, in fact, my main argument.
To give you a very simple example of what I mean:
Students in country A typically learn maths, A-nese, B-nese, history, sociology, ethics, some arts-related subject and may chose one or two STEM subjects, either geography or economics, have PE and must take either C-lish or Ancient-ish.
In some places you can also take electives or advanced courses.
Now a school for magic in country A may decide that a third language is not necessary and make that an elective (freeing up 3-4 hours a week every year) and limit their students to one STEM subject (1-3 hours a week freed up).
It may also add a few hours each week if this is absolutely necessary.
So now you have anywhere from 4-7 hours each week to teach magic, not counting the ones you may add, while still having all the essentials and not sacrificing art or PE.
That’s the equivalent of 2, maybe 3 subjects, which should be more than enough for most magic systems to teach some essentials and isn’t counting magic systems where they may be related to sports or benefit a lot from STEM subjects in which case you could easily involve PE or STEM subjects in magic and the other way around.
I have explicitly said that Hogwarts was a very poor example, being based on wish fulfillment more than anything else.
I haven’t named any others and their suitability/unsuitability, but I would expect that schools of that literary generation would have similar tendencies.
Modern ones may or may not as complaints about a lack of general education are becoming more mainstream which may lead authors to take it into account.
Interestingly, more medieval ones that focused solely on magic may actually make sense in the context of medieval society where education was generally specific to what you’d end up doing in your adult life.
Maybe this idea and the association of fantasy with vaguely medieval settings is another reason, along with wish fulfillment and the influence of Just Kidding Rowling.
Another aspect of why magic schools tend to focus on magic to an absurd degree may be that at least in my experience there seems to be some element of expecting magic schools to teach a advanced level of magic rather than deliver the equivalent of high school maths or English.
First of all, there is no article I’ve written. I’m a commenter here, I do not write for Mythcreants.
It is possible to have a magical school like the one you describe, although I would guess that in this case education in magic schould start at elementary-school level and be much slower. Yet, I do not really want to imagine elementary school pupils who do magic, if I’m honest.
Every specialized school, be it for arts (for instance future musicians or composers), sports (there’s a lot of those), or the STEM field will leave something out of the more or less balanced education of a student. There’s not only the question of hours per week (although that is a question), but also the question of how many different subjects you teach. Usually, you cut away what is less ‘useful’ either to society or to the students in question. That’s also how regular schools often handle budget cuts – they usually cut the arts as ‘least useful’ (their argument, not mine).
Scientists usually are weak in PE and arts. Art students are often neglecting science and PE, and future athletes are often low on science and the arts. There might be basic knowledge, but it won’t go far.
For a mage, adding magic is not just about adding another subject or two. It’s the same as with the specialized schools above. Magic will be the focus and classes will be taught depending on how ‘important’ they are for using magic.
Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t aware of that. Though I do maintain that the article has a serious flaw in that regard.
The point that was made wasn’t “You may end up not having quite as extensive a general knowledge as people who didn’t learn/focus on magic” but:
“One option is to have the characters split their time between magical and mundane subjects, but that still leaves the characters with an incomplete education, just not as severely. Every hour spent learning magic is an hour taken out of the school day – unless the magic is some kind of after-school elective, which isn’t what most stories are going for.”
And my point was that what is or isn’t a complete education varies a lot across countries and even within them and that the idea that learning can be accurately measured in the time it is taught is also fallacious.
(see: Usual results from American second language classes compared to most European second language classes and any two school systems with widely diverging study times.)
Your point about elementary school is interesting and probably depends a lot on the magic system and how widespread it is.
If it’s anything less than ubiquitous my gut instinct would be to limit it as a possible educational path offered by a few schools starting in secondary school, possibly even a few years later, or so with some schools focusing on it intently.
Kind of like the art branch in Realschule. Not super common but definitely not something that’s super strange and generally picked around grade 7.
To set the stage, in my experience elementary school lasts till 4th grade (6 to 10 year olds) and tends to be mostly focus on the first language (learning to read, comprehend and take infos from a text) and maths (basic calculus). Some general ecological and social knowledge (called “home and general education” in my country) as well as music also appear and all those tend to be rather flexible in schedule.
Ethics, art and PE have specific classes at specific times.
If magic is something used in everyday life and there are simple, fairly easy and harmless spells I can see it either being it’s separate class, possibly split into smaller groups if there is any risk involves, or being included in home and general education.
If it’s an “adult thing” in the same way that say cooking is, there may still be some discussion about the theory and uses in general ed.
If it’s more dangerous I’d assume it mainly comes into play in secondary education, maybe as I said as part of a lower-level specialization (taking the french/language branch, so to speak. New subject, still loads or education in the others).
TBH I kind of see a fairly slow approach and one that’s mostly about the basics as the most likely thing to happen outside of very specialized schools.
You are right that the arts and PE are definitely often early to go in general (happened to me in primary where, as I said, teaching time is mostly flexible), but at least where I live there’s a fairly well established canon that tends to include a bit of everything for anything above elementary and while some things can be added as electives or offered on a higher level (second language verbal practice, psychology courses and advanced art and PE* are prime examples) the school can’t just cut things in that canon.
However, in the hypothetical scenario or magic existing they absolutely have enough room to make another branch focused on that without necessarily losing more than you would with any other focus.
Though that may be a different experience to countries where the schools mostly choose by themselves?
It’s also not entirely true that you absolutely have to be terrible at all things but those you specialize in.
You may not be very good in it, but not being absolutely amazing isn’t the same as bad enough to be a real issue**, with magic not anymore than with maths or STEM and if there’s a nation-wide standard to meet the teaching generally isn’t going to be absolutely abysmal.
Especially when you consider that most of those very specialized schools are also highly privatized schools and thus likely to have access to good teachers, the money to buy materials and so on.
Also, weather magic will be a very specialized thing depends a lot on the world.
If it’s something fairly mundane that a majority of people can learn to some extent it might not be treated as something you need to specialize in.
Maybe this is in part an issue of different experiences/school systems?
I heard some schools have the same schedule for every day which, together with schools having the authority and intent of just cutting art and such (WTF?) be another factor that would make it hard (Either logistically or psychologically) to include magic.
Here we usually have different schedules day to day with most core subjects taking 3-4 hours weekly and most “lesser” ones 1-2 hours, rarely 3 and we occasionally have things like a third language that may be optional and would be replaces by more STEM in another branch, but which can be used as a model for introducing a new subject you wouldn’t usually have.
All this makes the idea of cutting things a little without removing them completely (2 instead of 3 hours of biology) and adding different subjects for your fantasy world is a far less daunting idea.
*Art and PE are prime candidates for advanced courses here. Not sure if the rest even really exists outside of non-integrated electives.
**It’s also part of what I like to call the “Competitive balance myth”.
It’s the idea that in life, like in a video game, you have a certain number of points to allocate and if you’re good at one thing you must be bad at another.
Now, time constraints are a thing, but at a high-school level it’s entirely possible to be great or at least above average at a large number of the subjects, even if one of them is something you pursue to a higher level than others.
I think the most logical step for magic would be the same as for other specialisations – wait until college/university (depending on where you live – I’m in Germany, we don’t have college).
I have been through a school system where the students have no choice about what they learn – there’s no advanced classes (I would have taken several, had they existed) and there’s few electives (depending on what the school offers, there’s no rules). The only choice I had until the last two years of school was which third language to learn (German was, obviously, the first and the one I learned about in primary school, English is generally the second one) – French or Latin. As I wasn’t about to study medicine or another subject which would require Latin (and you can take Latin classes in uni, too), my parents chose French for me (the choice had to be made at the beginning of seventh grade). As I went to the highest form of secondary school (Germany has three types), I was allowed to choose my classes in moderation (there are rules) for the last two years. Had I been in another school type, I wouldn’t have had any say about that.
In recent years, that highest type had a year taken off and it had severe consequences for the students – more hours a week to catch that year of extra content (you’d think they’d cut down on the curriculum, but no), less chances of doing extra stuff outside of school, a lot more homework. It has caused so much stress that some states have re-implemented the year by now or at least offer the students a choice between 8 or 9 years.
A similar problem might happen if you add magic (which probably won’t work with two more classes a week) to regular education.
I’m not saying that everyone is so specialized after going to a specialized school that they have no idea about anything else. Yet, the education about other areas will be different – if people wish, they can pick up on that in their spare time, of course, and quite some might. Yet, schools do value different subjects in a different way. I was in a scientifically-focused form of that school type, but there are also some which focus on humanities (Latin and, possibly, Ancient Greek would have been my additional languages there). So even without outright specialisation on one subject, what you learn can differ greatly within the same system. How much more would it differ between mages and not-mages?
Hey, same country!
And yea, G8 is definitely not pleasant, but I also don’t think that adding magic classes instead of a third (or fourth) language (depending on the type of school) would inherently be much more challenging than having any other kind of subject.
If there’s some practical aspect involved it may even prove to be more popular (or not, as can be seen with sports).
Remember, I’m mainly talking about magic at the level you’d get with other subjects, solid basics to build on, but not super advanced.
I could imagine something more in-depth for very specialized schools (as I said, similar to those really focusing on PE for example, so not a normal school just anyone would go to) but even there my ideas are more in the realm of preparation for college/university that can make getting in easier and may give you an advantage the first few weeks but nothing that would replace university/apprenticeship (whichever system is used).
I think introducing magic at college/university level can work in works where magic is generally very specialized and practiced by comparatively few people, but less so if mages are a significant portion of the middle class, involved in most sciences, engineering and even religion (or are similarly widespread whatever the reason).
You don’t send people to university without basic calculus knowledge and arguably this is similar in other subjects, why would a world where magic is important exclude it from the curriculum just because the world of the writer does not work by the same rules?
Though then who can use it and what having magic entails is also important. If it’s a talent that manifests or can get dangerous then classes are important, even if it’s not a major part of society.
If magic is highly valued then society will probably likewise teach it fairly early as more time to practice tends to lead to more experience, though this can of course have sinister aspects.
Honestly it almost seems more likely for magic to not be included in education in some way unless it’s secret or is (and can be) effectively outlawed.
Whatever way you look at it, it tends to be useful for one thing or another so you want to either teach those that have it or teach those whose parents can afford the education because we tend to want to make sure to impart the things we value on kids (see also: art vs. maths, trust me, magic is rarely the art in this comparison).
Now, the logistics of how can obviously be difficult and there would be gaps between mages and non-mages, but those gaps already exist more or less and magic by definition would certainly affect society in a major way.
*UNlikely to not be included in education, sorry. Terrible place for a typo.
I really like the idea of students going to a magical college, especially if it’s a community college setting or something like that. There aren’t many stories like that to my knowledge. If the villains know that the faculty are doing their best to keep the students safe while in school, they can attack the students at some place like their homes. The students wouldn’t be expected to be on campus much other than during class or if they have to take care of business at the school.
Creo que me he dado cuenta de algo:
La gente que quiera ir a una escuela de magia, es porque tiene magia que la hace divertida, pero esa misma magia hace que muchas cosas que veríamos en una escuela no existan y si no existen, la gente no querrá asistir a esa escuela de magia.
What language is that in? I don’t speak that language. I’d prefer it in English instead.
From Google translate:
***
I think I’ve realized something:
People who want to go to a school of magic, it is because it has magic that makes it fun, but that same magic means that many things that we would see in a school do not exist and if they do not exist, people will not want to attend that school of magic.
***