Magical Schools for the Greater Good

[Vael]

I'll second Strixhaven and The Magicians. Both, admittedly, are more about college level, not elementary/high school age kids, but they engage with the material in interesting ways. The books The Magicians are based on, I'll admit I only read the first one and found it okay, but it apparently is an interesting response to The Chosen One narratives that are prevalent in ... those books.

Speaking of which, the other one I'd suggest is Rainbow Rowell's Simon Snow Trilogy: Carry On, Wayward Son and Anyway the Wind Blows ... it's HP fanfic (kinda, the world is different, but it is very much a take on HP) and a Harry/Draco one at that. I spent half the book expecting a Cease and Desist from Rowling, so reading a very queer, much more pop cultured fan ficy response to the books feels like delightful spite.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There's also American Horror Story: Coven from 2013. It was set in a girls magic school in New Orleans during modern times.

Stevie Nicks as an actual witch made up for Ryan Murphy's many narrative sins.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'll second Strixhaven and The Magicians. Both, admittedly, are more about college level, not elementary/high school age kids, but they engage with the material in interesting ways. The books The Magicians are based on, I'll admit I only read the first one and found it okay, but it apparently is an interesting response to The Chosen One narratives that are prevalent in ... those books.

I really like the Magicians novels, but they're explicitly trying to be literary fantasy, rather than straight fantasy, which I think turns a lot of people off. (One of the big ongoing themes is "adulting sucks," which is not exactly swashbuckling fantasy.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Game-wise, Kids on Brooms is a great toolkit for making your own not-Hogwarts. And it bends over backwards to say that all people, of every possible possibility, should feel comfortable at the table.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Huh!

Even though I’ve personally used them in my homebrewed FRPG settings, other than Earthsea, Diskworld and The Magicians TV series, I don’t recall encountering formal schools of magic in fantasy fiction beyond the implications that some exist/existed in a given setting. But they weren’t the focus of the stories, so they were not detailed beyond the occasional mention.

Academies for “gifted beings“ seems more common in Sci-Fi and superheroic fiction.

 

[Dioltach]

If I remember correctly: Hadrumal, in Juliette E. McKenna's books. The details are a bit blurry, because I never finished reading the series and it was a long time ago.

(And of course there's the Jedi Academy. It might be space, but it's still magic.)

 

[Bolares]

Misfits and Magic is a great show for those who like TTRPG liveplays....

 

[MGibster]

Stevie Nicks as an actual witch made up for Ryan Murphy's many narrative sins.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about the episode with the oddly out of place music video.

 

[Umbran]

I don’t recall encountering formal schools of magic in fantasy fiction beyond the implications that some exist/existed in a given setting.

Check the Literature section of the TV tropes page on the topic. There's a lot of it. some is reference being in the world, but a lot is focused on the school itself.

Wizarding School - TV Tropes

In ye olden days, people learned skills by being apprenticed to someone, so it was natural to assume that magicians would learn the ropes in the same manner. Then, the modern age saw the rise of public schooling and universities almost completely …

tvtropes.org

 

[AnotherGuy]

Has anyone mentioned the Rectrix of Aretuza?