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

[roseembolism]

One idea might be magic as an extender of normal abilities. As in, there are magical knitting needles and kitchen tools, but that can't do a better job than the wizard. So if you want your magic to be useful at something, you have to be good at it yourself.

[keith_morrison]

One way that would work is that magic is transient: it can effect the world, but once it's done, normal rules apply. So you might be able to use magic to construct a building, but once that's done, the building has to be structurally sound in order to stay up. So someone wanting to build a structure with magic has to either follow very detailed instructions or be enough of a skilled builder/engineer to figure out what they have to do in order to keep it from falling apart under its own weight.

[mikeda]

There's the illusion magic in Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories series. It has some quasi-technological uses but it's mostly used for art and entertainment.

In that series it's very common for people to have some ability with illusion magic but there are only a relatively small number of people who do it professionally.

(If I recall correctly, the social use of illusion magic tends to be a female pasttime but the ARTISTS tend to be male.)