The Enduring Appeal of Magic Schools

Why do we love the magic school trope?

If there’s one trope that saturates the fantasy genre, it’s the Magic School. The most successful fantasy series of recent years, Harry Potter, consists of 7 whole books set almost entirely within a magic school. Clearly the author was on to something!

So what makes this particular setting so appealing, to adults and children alike? How might you make use of the magic school trope in your own stories?

In this short article, I’ll share some of my thoughts on the magic school genre, as well as the place of school in society and how a broad swathe of people might subconsciously respond to alternative depictions of school in fiction as a result.

Magic Fantasy Schools

Fantasy schools in general offer an idealised representation of childhood. They do so using an institution that’s so pervasive in modern society that most people seem to view it as part of the natural landscape: school.

For the writer, the possibilities offered by a magic school are rather enticing. Simply by using the word ‘school’ we’re already sharing a lot of assumed knowledge with the reader: in this institution there are teachers and students, classes and timetables organised by age group and subject. There may also be uniforms, houses, merits, and house points. Disciplinary measures might range from demerits and detentions to corporal punishment. In ot her words, school is a very detailed, high-resolution concept represented by a single word. It’s so handy, it’s almost a cliché.

Writers of the fantasy genre are resigned to the reality that they have a lot to teach their readers about the world of their imagination. In a magic fantasy setting, readers have to know enough about how magic works in order to enjoy the story. What better way of teaching them than literally sitting them down in a school of magic, where all the gritty detail of the magic system can be explored in its natural environment?

This is not to say that magic school scenes must be didactic learning exercises. In fact, the most treasured examples of magic schools in fiction are primarily social settings, where we learn about people and places rather than systems. Most of our time in Hogwarts is spent exploring the castle, cracking jokes with friends, and embarking on mystery-solving mini-adventures. If there’s anything to be learned, we encounter it through a throwaway detail, or a lecture from the class swot and full-time exposition machine, Hermione. Story-relevant magic education from teachers in classes happens perhaps once or twice per book.

Likewise, the extended University sequences in Patrick Rothfuss’ perennially unfinished trilogy beginning with The Name of the Wind are primarily social settings. We follow the main character Kvothe through his friendships and rivalries with other students, his feuds and fellowships with powerful teachers, gradually becoming aware of how those dynamics relate to the wider world outside the University. Magic is always present, but rarely enjoys the limelight.

And this is fundamental to the nature of magic in fiction. Magic observed too closely is merely physics: an alternative system of clear laws by which the universe operates. A bad enough writer can thus make cosmos-warping superpowers feel as boring as the Navier-Stokes equations.

Mundane Schools

When we compare the rich and wonderful world of magic schools with the realities of schooling on our mundane planet, the contrast is rather stark.

Schooling in developed countries is an extension of the state. Most schools are run by the state, employing teachers paid by the state, enforcing a state-determined curriculum, and running compulsory state-sanctioned exams. These exams then qualify young adults (or elderly teenagers) to enter the universities, another tier of feeder system to the state institutions that acts as a gigantic, expensive filter.

In the USA, entire families save up across decades in order to afford the exorbitant tuition fees and living costs required to enter the university feeder system, while others view it as normal to take out huge loans for the privilege of experiencing a big name university education. One wonders whether $100,000 might be better spent throughout a child’s early life in order to provide them with rich and interesting learning experiences, like private classes in science, art and culture, or foreign travel, and so on.

Like schools, universities receive much of their funding through state-controlled grants. And since the graduates of universities spread out to occupy the elite managerial class in both the private sector and governments worldwide, this educational instution is central to any understanding of global society.

Of course, this is not the picture of school and university that you’re likely to have while being raised by it, as a child. In order to succeed in the education system it’s helpful to believe in its stated mission, to hold its peculiar notions of academic excellence through standardised testing as synonymous with merit and learning. Many people thus come to believe the pernicious myth that the only way to learn is to be taught by a teacher in a school-like environment.

Throughout an enormous body of literature, film and TV covering the school setting, this big-picture perspective of the role of school in life is almost never explored. What we are treated to instead is a variety of idealised school experiences, as well as a negligible handful of idealistically bad or dysfunctional schools (for balance). Seemingly half of the entire corpus of anime and manga manages to devolve into an unoriginal school story of some kind. The usual rules apply: parents are next to nonexistent and teachers are minor characters, creating an artificial arena of freedom in which a group of childhood friends can determine their own destiny.

It's easy to see why this is attractive to readers.

The Psychology of School Fiction

Given that adult psychology emerges from the psychology of the child, one could argue that all adults are to some extent subconsciously attempting to live their adult life as an ideal version of their non-ideal experiences of childhood (which, in the modern world, is mostly comprised of school).

In other words, they aim to savour the keenly-felt triumphs of those early years, whilst avoiding their disappointments, regrets, and failures. Since human experience is vicarious by nature – just look at the phenomenon of ‘cringe’ where we feel intense second-hand embarrassment for someone doing something silly in public – the psychological landscape of early triumphs and failures is built not only on our own school experiences, but also on that of our classmates.

If that picture is even remotely true, then school-based fiction offers a validation of that psychological impulse to recreate the triumphs of childhood in its most natural setting, the school, which other settings can merely emulate at best.

The primary difference between fictional school and real school is the extent of freedom which fictional characters enjoy. Whether it’s the mysteriously unchecked powers of a school council in Japanese animation, or simply the wealth of free time available for the pursuit of adventures and the solving of mysteries in Harry Potter, freedom to grow, learn, and explore is a hallmark of treasured fictional schools.

There’s also an assumption of safety at play. Teachers might be background characters in the story, but the protagonists understand that if things go wrong, they can call on someone who will help them without asking for anything in return. Their assistance might come at the price of a scolding, but that’s a pretty fair trade – both help and safety in the adult world are much more expensive than a telling-off. (Have you seen how much lawyers and hospitals charge in the US, lately?)

Which, then, is most appealing – safety or freedom? That depends on the psychology of the reader, but I think we all have an inherent desire for both that’s propitiated by the school genre.

I personally don’t engage much with school-based fiction these days, where schools are the primary setting of the entire story. As a genre, I think school stories tend to be predictable and even infantilising. But magic schools appear in a lot of different places, such as in The Name of the Wind, where their presence isn’t so prominent as to change the genre of the story. If you ask me, that’s how a magic school can be best used in fantasy fiction: creating a partial picture of an institution central to the setting and to the characters’ development, without taking over the story to do so.

Underlining this point is the structure of the first entry in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: Hogwarts was certainly central to the story, but Harry didn’t even get there until halfway through the book. The conflict between his dreary Muggle world and the chasing tendrils of the magic one, the oppression of the cruel yet bourgeois Dursleys versus the kindly half-giant Hagrid, all of these important story threads took precedence over a mere escape into Hogwarts – and the latter is a far better-realised setting for having taken the time to flesh out the world in which it stands.

The Last Word

Magic schools are fun to play with in fiction; schools are a great way to provide exposition to readers, while magic can fulfil a power fantasy or simply provide depth and texture to a world that would otherwise be mundane. However, the school genre is so saturated that writers have to be careful not to sink into the mire of cliché; one way to write a successful magic school section is to focus on character interactions rather than the magic itself, which largely takes a back seat.

School-based fiction has a threefold appeal to reader psychology that’s not often found in many genres: it appeals to our diverse and conflicting desires for nostalgia, freedom, and safety. The attraction to school fiction for children is even stronger, as it’s an idealised version of an immediately recognisable setting that they experience through daily life.

Let me know what you thought of this article, and I look forward to reading your comments. If you liked this discussion, please consider sharing with a friend using the button below.

The music in the audio recording is an arrangement of ‘Hedwig’s Theme’ by the talented YouTube pianist Patrick Pietschmann. You can listen to the full version here; he used to publish sheet music for this arrangement, but the dark gods of copyright seem to have thrown their thunderbolts at it more than once. (The original was of course composed by John Williams for the soundtrack of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone).