Stealing from someone's comment about Cobra Kai:

[james_davis_nicoll]

Most fantastic school settings have the wizards/metahumans/whatever steered into one or maybe two specialized facilities. What if instead it works like sports or debate and every school in the region has their own program?

Comments

[dagibbs]

I think it is going to depend on how common/wide-spread the "special" thing is.

One of the basic assumptions of our school system is that everybody(*) can learn. Everybody can learn to read. Everybody can learn history. Everybody can learn math. Of course, some will be better at this than others.

If we speculate a world where everybody can do magic to some extent or other, but some are better than others, then, yes, it would makes sense that it would be part of the school system. Colleges/universities would have faculties of magic (along side science or engineering), and lower schools might have classes in whatever the easiest of magic skills are... "Basic Focus" or whatever.

But a more super-heros/meta-humans we have a couple problems. Generally only a small fraction of the population is "super"; and generally every power is different. There might be meta-human studies, but it would be studying meta-humans, perhaps from an anthropological/sociological point of view, or perhaps from a physical sciences point of view, but it wouldn't be "how to super better". And, similar problem for recruiting super-sports -- how do you establish competitions when everyone is different.


* The assumption is, I think really, that almost everybody can learn, and those that can't don't really matter.

[roseembolism]

In the case of magic, the go-to reference would be Operation Chaos (ignoring the politics, lalalala). Magic is commonplace, but a professional magic user needs to specialize in it with a college program.

[(Anonymous)]

And a fellow who has a legitimately useful wartime magical skill goes to college to get an engineering degree (having had no luck in Hollywood) while the magical equivalent of a intelligence officer (say a code breaker) gets a job as a professor pretty easily. So magic helps - but training and study matter.