I admit that I’ve often struggled with my role as an educator, even as I’ve felt it to be my calling, specifically because of what I’ve come to call The State of Things in Higher Education. It’s enough to suck the magic right out of learning. And yet, every time fall rolls around, I feel the bone-deep nostalgia for the start of the school year. No. Nostalgia is not quite the right word. It is the tireless and eternal sense of wonder and magic that new classes promise.
At their best, the classroom, the college campus, and even the school library are all nourishing spaces for imagination, innovation, and pure potential. And that’s what makes them so magical. It’s no surprise to me then, as an absolute nerd who has always found her home in these spaces, that a wealth of magic school stories would spring up in fantasy fiction…and speculative fiction, science fiction, horror…all the good genres have their version of magic schools. And why not? They’re fun and hold a mirror to both the wonder and difficulties inherent in any learning environment.
What We Love About Magic School
Like the elevated aesthetic and affluence of a teen rom-com that somehow makes those wretched teen years feel more glamorous than they actually are, magic schools make our mundane learning experiences feel more exciting with higher stakes, bigger opportunities, and more than a few mysteries to uncover or enchantments to cast.
Perhaps the most well-known version of the magic school is Hogwarts by an Author Who Shall Not Be Named, given her terrible and well-documented transphobia and the fact that she funds Voldemort-worthy hate groups. Authorial BS aside, I agree with the actors who played her iconic characters on screen when they came out against her: It’s okay to separate the art from the artist, value the stories, the progressive values they champion, and the world they have given us while also not wanting to contribute to her bank account or endorse her hateful beliefs. I say all this because it is IMPOSSIBLE to talk about stories involving magical schools without talking about Hogwarts.
And you can see why…it has everything we want in a magic school! Mysterious and changing passageways, dark secrets (whole chambers of them), magical artifacts tucked away in nooks and crannies, resident ghosts, and, perhaps my favorite, a magical library, not to mention generations of lore built into its very bones. It is a sanctuary, a place of learning, a place of magic-making.
In later books, it becomes a dangerous place of propaganda and indoctrination. Although those days of literal torture didn’t last long, thanks to the previously well-rounded education of the young wizards by actual Quality Educators (and all Quality Educators are Wizards, believe me), that storyline also points to the classroom as what we call pedagogical contact zones or spaces where people from disparate groups come together to learn. The very nature of a contact zone, however, is inherently unstable. With a good educator, it’s a safe space to explore and learn. With a bad educator, it becomes a space that emphasizes difference, strife, and xenophobia.
That’s the thing with magic: It’s a neutral energy, and depending on who wields it, it can be used for good or ill. So, too, can the classroom, this liminal space, this contact zone, be a sight of innovation and collaboration…or isolation and rigidity.
At the end of the day, the education you receive is only as good as what you do with it. In other words, personal agency matters. When defense against the dark arts is no longer theoretical information in a textbook or facts to be memorized for a final, but suddenly the practice you actually need to defeat the dark lord, well, it’s easy to see how education has a real-world impact on us all.
But Hogwarts is not the first school of magic and certainly not the only one. In fact, The Author Who Shall Not Be Named participated in a very long tradition of boarding school fiction, more generally, and magic school specifically, in Britain. And it just goes to show you that sometimes the most well-known example of a sub-genre isn’t necessarily the best.
A Brief History of Magic School
As with most things on the Bruja Professor, I am now, to loosely quote Jane Austen, about to embark on a biased, prejudiced, and impartial history of magic schools in fantasy fiction. Okay, as far as I know, Austen never went to or studied magic school, but you never know, given how many magic schools and worlds must remain hidden from the regular human gaze. But she was partial to biased, prejudiced, and ignorant histories, and so am I, as they are great starting points to any lively discussion or mode of inquiry. Sometimes, we don’t know what we don’t know until we get the conversation started. All by way of saying, I’m sure I won’t manage to include all the examples of magic school fiction out there, so if I’ve left out an important one or your favorite, do let me know, and I would be happy to learn more about it and include it here.
Depending on how far back you want to go, you can find the concept of magic schools going all the way back to 1800s with rumors of Scholomance, a Romanian school where you could legit learn the dark arts. And yes, it was purported to be located in THE Transylvania and run by THE Devil. The legend writes itself, am I right? It was, in fact, a big inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This myth also became the inspiration behind Naomi Novik’s Scholomance Trilogy (2020-2022), but more on that in a second.
In fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin is often credited with one of the first depictions of a wizarding school in her Earthsea Trilogy (1968-1972). Although the school wasn’t a core feature of these books, it still left its impact. I hesitate to loudly claim she was, in fact, the first author to write about a magic school because the collective unconscious is real and knows no bounds of time or space. That means that even if you have never read something before, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Multiple people can have similar ideas or inspirations at the same time—just look at the explosion of witchy romances in the past few years. I doubt all those writers got together and said, “Let’s write a bunch of books that all sound very similar!” No, they were tapping into a moment, consciously or unconsciously, where the collective unconscious spoke to them of a need for more magical stories during a time of social and political upheaval. So, too, do magic school narratives come in and out of vogue, but always center on the very human experience of navigating the privileged space of the classroom, the power—and danger—of knowledge, and the difficulties of figuring out one of life’s greatest mysteries: other people.
Perhaps my favorite magic school stories are thanks to Jill Murphy and her series The Worst Witch, which debuted in 1974 and ran through 2018. There is a well-known 1986 film adaptation of the first book in the series and an adorable Netflix series that ran from 2017-2020, among other adaptations. The series was inspired by Murphy’s own experience in school, including the fact that she never quite fit in. She recalls that she came home with her friends one day. They had wild hair and uniforms all askew at the sight of which her mother exclaimed, “You look like the three witches caught in the rain!”
Thus, an idea was born.
The Worst Witch series explores both the fun and difficulties of school, including bullies and besties, teachers who see your potential, and those who undermine you at every turn. It’s also a series about agency and empowerment, which are important things for young children, especially girls. The young heroine in the series, Mildred Hubble, is set up as a misfit from the start, as she is the only witch not to get a black cat, but a tabby cat who she later names Tabby. From there, she gets into her fair share of mischief, from bungling spells to dodging dodgy hexes from her nemesis, the snooty privileged Ethel Hallow, to saving the teachers from a villainous plot that would turn them all into frogs. Mildred, in other words, is your average kid who, with the help of her friends, uses her creativity, smarts, and compassion to figure her way through life.
How magical is that?
From there, we have Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series and a myriad of other magic school books that have blossomed from a love of the sub-genre. Still, we can see that magic schools have always been around, even if they don’t always look like Hogwarts. For example, we have the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning in the X-Men comics since the 1960s, Camp Half-Blood in the Percy Jackson series (2005-2009), The Aes Sedai’s White Tower in The Wheel of Time series (1990-2013)…I could go on and on, but you get the idea. We even get glimpses of the darker side of magical education in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), where a central struggle in the alternate-world Oxford is between the fundamental empathy that any seeker of knowledge should nourish and the diabolical drive for answers to big cosmic questions at the expense of our humanity.
Truth be told, it’s the same struggle you see on a mundane college campus as well, and it begs the question: At what point does our desire for knowledge turn into an unquenchable thirst that threatens our very humanity so that we are nothing but talking heads? It's a fine balance between loving learning and getting so lost in ideas that you forget that you are a living, breathing human being. But the one thing that keeps me grounded, and, dare I say, on the right path, is knowing that books and education are only truly magical if we use them to become more empathetic, understanding, and compassionate human beings.
Okay, stepping down from the soap box now.
Streaming services like Netflix capitalize on this love of magic schools, picking up shows like SyFy’s The Magicians, based on the book trilogy (2015-2020), Fate: The Winx Saga (2021-2022), and Wednesday (2022-present), a whimsigoth spin-off of the Addams Family franchise. What do these shows have in common? Vibes for DAYS. These are worlds we want to spend time in, however strange and dangerous.
I could go on and on with my examples, but I won’t. At the end of the day, these stories conjure an adolescent experience fraught with wonder and darkness. So, you know, just like the average school experience, only cooler.
Genre Conventions of Magic School Books
You can see why it’s a winning genre. Like a small town in a cozy mystery, the magic school genre provides a fertile, contained setting for storytelling. It’s easy to set up the context, a cast of reoccurring characters, and conflict. Adolescent drama and social hierarchies write themselves…and, okay, the only thing that really changes as you age is your, well, age.
The setting itself becomes one of the best parts of the stories, as it embodies a place away from the ordinary world and the promise of excitement, knowledge, and hidden magics, just as any classroom does for avid life-long learners.
Magic vs the Mundane
Most magic school books exist as a secret alternate reality if the book isn’t set in a world that openly acknowledges magic. The magical people who populate those groups sometimes coexist alongside mundane students in a seemingly mundane university, like the students in the Netflix series The Order (2019-2020), or the magic school is hidden within the local university in Erin Sterling’s The Ex Hex (2021). More often, a whole other magical world lives just under the surface of The Real (Read: Non-Magical) World. Magical beings can move fluidly in and out of magic and mundane worlds, but it is usually VERY DANGEROUS to do so as they might risk DISCOVERY and, naturally, the pitchforks and fearful mobs that might follow as a result.
Let’s be real: finding people who like to nerd out about the things you want to nerd out about can feel like belonging to a super cool, super secret club. There might even be secret handshakes involved. It’s even more special when you are assigned to study it or, like me, teach it. Again, this is total catnip for anyone who knows the magic of a good book, a library sanctuary, or an energized classroom. When our lives can feel chaotic and messy, magic schools are there to bring a sense of order and, dare I say, joy. And they make us feel welcomed in our strange studies when it seems the rest of the world has no idea what we’re talking about.
Learning as a Spiritual Practice
My favorite trope taps into the ephemeral, spiritual part of learning, that numinous flash when pure insight happens in a classroom. It can’t be forced. It only occurs seemingly when the stars align, and we all have that collective “Ah-ha!” moment. I’ve felt it before as a student and more times than I can count as a professor. I’ve felt it amidst a pile of library books in study halls and as I carefully turn the pages of books in the bowls of special collections, even when I’m not using them to cast spells. I’ve even felt it going down a cyber rabbit hole, where one reference leads to another and, after a few clicks and more open tabs on my web browser than I can count, I suddenly have a story, an article, a beautiful collection of hidden histories.
It’s the kind of spark that only ignites when you’ve spent enough time researching that your sources begin to reveal themselves to you. Or you’ve built such a warm, curious learning community that it takes on an energy of its own. It’s not something you learn how to do from a textbook or even in pedagogy classes. It’s a lived feeling, a pervasive sense that magic is in the air. And it only shows up when you’re doing the work—in the classroom, on the computer, in the library.
Knowledge is Magic
Knowledge is magic, but it is also a neutral force, as I said earlier, which is why that energy can be used for good or bad. One of the most important themes of magic school books is that magic—and knowledge—can be dangerous. It gets you questioning, after all. Wondering and growing and broadening your perspective. You can never be the same person you were at the start of a class as you were at the end of it, nor the same before and after you read a book.
Knowledge changes a person. And it’s up to the individual to decide how they want to wield that knowledge. Having worked over 17 years in higher education and been a student long before, I have seen people devote themselves to making their corners of the world better by following their path, inspiring people to expand their worldview, and always striving to use their power for good. But I’ve also seen people feed the darkness, using their education to gate-keep, reinforce systemic oppression, and become more and more rigid and self-righteous in their beliefs.
It is my belief and practice that those of us who see even the most mundane of schools as magical can find agency and hope in these spaces in a world where we might otherwise feel disempowered.
Magic School Graduates to Dark Academia
One of the interesting trends I’ve noticed in this genre is the recent emphasis on dark academia. Believe me, it’s not just dark, moody vibes and Oxford University aesthetics. It’s also white supremacy, elitism, and pseudo-liberalism. But readers more often look to dark academia for vibes so rich and cozy they can make things like the slow turning wheels of bureaucracy look romantic and rigid social hierarchies seem as glamorous and fantastical as Regency high society in a historical romance…unless, of course, you work in academia like me, and can see all the cracked plaster and lack of funding behind the dim lighting and petty pecking orders.
Naomi Novick’s Scholomancy trilogy (2020-2022), inspired by yea old Scholomance myths, takes the idea of an elite magic school and turns it into a dark and deadly place. Her story follows the daughter of a healer as she navigates this school of devilry and deceit. Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches series (2012-2014) dips into this vibe, looking at the dark, hidden magics in special collections and ancient texts. Refreshingly, R.F. Kuang doesn’t waste time on the niceties of dark academic vibes in Babel (2022) and, instead, cuts directly to the heart of what darkness in academia actually is: violent cultural assimilation and social conditioning.
As we head into spooky season, I’ve come across more reading lists for dark academia that look both intriguing and divine, like this one from the She Wore Black Podcast and this cozy one from The Fairytale Magazine. I will freely admit, however, that I haven’t read all the books they’ve listed because TRIGGERING. I honestly have to be in the right mood for these books because they can send me down a dark and twisted path of ugly thoughts in regard to The State of Things Higher Education. (Seriously, if anyone wants to know how to torture me, all they have to do is duct tape me to a chair and force me to watch Netflix’s The Chair (2021) until I tell them whatever they want to hear. It’s got all of the dark academia without the glamorous vibes, which somehow makes things worse.)
What this more grown-up iteration of this sub-genre makes me want more of, in truth, is magic school stories that focus on the educators: the personas we present to our students, the administrative struggles, the personal entanglements, and telenovela-worthy dramas that only a bunch of highly educated fools can stir up…only cooler, because, you know, magic and enchanted libraries and sometimes more agency and autonomy being an educator, instead of a student…and sometimes not. It seems to me that we often overlook the “secret” lives of teachers and, at least to an educator like myself, forget that we are always conjuring enchantments for our classrooms, our students, ourselves, often with little support from the bureaucracy, which can often feel like nothing short of a miracle.
In the end, magic school stories hold up an enchanted mirror to our educational lives (or jobs for those of us who work in education). They reflect the evils of the system and the numinous energy inherent in any learning space, the academic wounds that scar us for life, and the powerful revelations that fundamentally change who we are as human beings and set us on our life’s path. As with all things, a college campus, a school, or a library is never just one thing. Yet, as I ease into my own conjurings and rituals for the fall term, I can’t help but think that the classroom is, and always will be, magic.
Image of a magic school with the words, “The Bruja Professor: Why We All Want to Go to Magic School.”
The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.
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