Wizard Academy

[dspringer1]

It is pretty clear that wizards are old school.  They teach via the ancient model of apprentice/master.    But times have moved on.  We have seen with Luccio that they created a boot camp for new wardens that was quite successful.   I can see the possibility that they extend that model to create a wizard academy to more easily train wizards in larger numbers.  Something like this would be essential if Harry's ideas regarding training Paranet members is implemented.   

How would such a magical academy work?  I doubt it would be very Harry Potter, but I can see something comparable to a old style college format.   A dozen different "schools" each focused on a particular discipline that combines lecture and practice.   Each taught by an expert in that type of magic.   Everybody takes the basics, but students generally continue in a specific school based on success/skill/aptitude.   

They certainly do not have enough students right now to have a dozen concurrent schools taught, but they could teach a few schools every month and just alternate.   As student populations increase, they can run more classes concurrently. 

The advanced classes might continue via the apprentice model - especially as the WC is still paranoid about wizards misusing their power.  They would want experienced wizards to personally evaluate candidates before teaching them advanced magical techniques.   

[SintraEdrien]

Yes, but the real question is, how much would it torment Harry for this to occur? *evil grin*. But I think the closest JB has touched on this possibility is with the side-line of stories regarding Maggie/Mouse and their school "for the gifted".

[LordDresden2]

It is pretty clear that wizards are old school.  They teach via the ancient model of apprentice/master.    But times have moved on.  We have seen with Luccio that they created a boot camp for new wardens that was quite successful.   I can see the possibility that they extend that model to create a wizard academy to more easily train wizards in larger numbers.  Something like this would be essential if Harry's ideas regarding training Paranet members is implemented.   

How would such a magical academy work?  I doubt it would be very Harry Potter, but I can see something comparable to a old style college format.   A dozen different "schools" each focused on a particular discipline that combines lecture and practice.   Each taught by an expert in that type of magic.   Everybody takes the basics, but students generally continue in a specific school based on success/skill/aptitude.   

The advanced classes might continue via the apprentice model - especially as the WC is still paranoid about wizards misusing their power.  They would want experienced wizards to personally evaluate candidates before teaching them advanced magical techniques.

You could probably set something like that up, with very basic training done en masse, using standardized approaches.  But as above, I think magic is probably something best learned one-on-one or one-on-few once you get past the basics.

A further complication would be that the various kinds of Wizards in the Council, with their various national/ethnic/religious/historical backgrounds, probably have very different approaches to and methods with magic.  It might prove to be very hard to standardize even the basics.  Somehow I suspect that Ancient Mai, Injun Joe, and Arthur Langtry would define the 'basics' very differently.

The hardest part would be selecting the candidates, though.

[Zaphodess]

Luccio's boot camp was chosen several times by the Red Court as a target, though. Even without a war going on, a school full of untrained wizards is a juicy target if you want to hurt the WC.

It's possible that some wizards do teach their apprentices together in seminar-style from time to time. Why bother teaching your apprentice potions if your friend is a master alchemist but you are a master enchanter. In turn, their apprentices come over sometimes and get instructions in enchanting from you. Or they might take turns in teaching theory that can be done in greater groups. It would mean less work for each individual master, so there's a huge benefit for the masters and better teaching for the apprentices, who receive expert training on all subjects. Besides: both masters and apprentices have the opportunity to do some networking.

We didn't see something like that in the books because Justin isolated his apprentices from other wizards and both Harry and Molly were warlocks who hardly any other wizard would have offered to teach. But Listens to Wind once offered teaching Molly some healing magic, so it might not be uncommon to get training from someone besides your individual master.

btw: The apprentice system may be very old, but that doesn't mean it isn't efficient. If it ain't broken, why fix it? As magic is often very personal, a personal one on one instruction might just be mandative for some things.

[Anubissama]

Seeing as with the population explosion there will be more and more Wizard-level talents out there a move to a more group-oriented teaching is likely.

I think a Jedi model would work the best. Children with Wizard-talent are moved to Edinburgh for schooling as Younglings, and once they go through a basic training a Wizard chooses them to become his Apprentice (padawan) to finish their training and attuned the final teachings to their specific talents and way of expressing magic.

The system, of course, would need the cooperation of the Paranet or something similar to catch strong talents.

[Quantus]

Group training is not out of the question, but as Devil's Advocate the modern world (and the US in particular) has a huge shortage in skilled trademen, and one of the big contributing factors is that many of these skills require the sort of guided on-the-job training that is simply impractical to provide in a school setting. And Internships are basically short-term Apprenticeships.   The Teacher/Apprentice model is far from outdated even in modern society, and can still win out against group/classroom training in several important ways, many of which I think apply to Magical study as much or more than others.  For that matter, Id submit that the vast majority of actual education in the modern world is still ON-The-Job Training. 


That being said, I have to assume that there is typically more shared teaching and classroom settings than we've seen Harry involved with, but he skipped all the normal apprenticeship stages (since he was inducted as a full member based on his fight with Justin) and went straight to probationary member.  I think it was Cold Case that mentioned how much of the standard education he skipped. 

I will say that I think the group teaching Wizard Academy mindset works far better with the Wardens than it necessarily would with your average Member, were the practices can be far more specific/specialized and would not necessarily be required to have skills outside your own wheelhouse.  But somebody has to teach all Wardens the Sword, or how to run an Investigation,  or any number of specific Duty-required skills that a non-warden Master simply wouldnt be expected to know let alone teach.


I think the question boils down to how Standard those early lessons really are, versus how much individual problem-solving and adapting lessons to Talents, especially at the early stages when magic does weird shit like making an apprentice literally glow when they get a compliment.  Either

A)the early lessons just establish the basics, later lessons (1-on-1 or classroom) could be taught by increasingly specialized instructors with decreased class sizes until it becomes basically an apprenticeship; that's more or less the modern system with single classes at low levels, with increasingly specialized classes in high school, college, and beyond.  Or,

B)The early education NEEDS to be closer to one-on-one while Control is established somebody knowledgeable and dedicated to supervise and troubleshoot and customize lessons to individual emotio0nal blocks, etc. Then only once their magical skills and control (and understanding) have reached a certain point would they have enough common ground with other practitioners to take advantage of group teaching methods. 


Or Neither is overwhelmingly the case, and so for the most part either method could work, and it's just a matter of relative resources. 

[dspringer1]

The apprentice system may be very old, but that doesn't mean it isn't efficient. If it ain't broken, why fix it?

Scale.  The White Council cannot train a lot of wizards using the apprentice model.   Realistically many wizards are not good teachers and thus would not have apprentices.  Many wizards are too busy to have an apprentice.  Any one wizard with apprentices would rarely have more than one apprentice.  A school would enable the same number of wizards to teach a lot more apprentices. 

As magic is often very personal, a personal one on one instruction might just be mandative for some things.

This is the biggest argument against a school.  if every wizard has a completely different approach, then it is hard to teach them collectively.   The success of the boot camp implies that this is not an insurmountable problem, but it would certainly complicate things.  I think it would be inevitable that any academy system would make make wizards "style" more consistent over time. 

[Rasins]

Actually I think this is kind of done in a way.

IIRC, in Summer Knight, wasn't the apprentice that came back from Winter one of Ancient Mai's apprentices?  Now, that could mean that he was her latest.  Or it could mean that he was one of many current apprentices.

Also, in Dead Beat, when Harry was talking to Sheila, he saw a book, written by Ebenezar McCoy, that is handed to most new apprentices because it taught basics (again, if I recall correctly).

So, the elements are there, it's more of a getting it going.  Like the Paranet.  Luccio is working on that.  I'd bet a school is the next step.

[wyltok]

My main argument against wizard school would have to be Harry Potter.

By the time Harry, Ron, and Hermione graduated from Hogwarts, they were completely incapable of holding down a job in the real world. In the case of Ron, I wouldn't even trust him to go to the corner store to buy my groceries. What they were, is perfectly set up to have a life inside the wizard community, and nowhere else.

The reason a warden boot camp makes sense is because wardens get a stipend, that is, they get paid at the end. Most wizards don't appear to make a living out of performing magic. What benefit would they get out of going to wizard school?

That said, the White Council does have a big problem in their hands, due to the population explosion increasing the number of people with wizard class potential out there. They're definitely gonna have to figure out some way of dealing with that in the future, but unless they can offer people a way of making a living out of performing magic, I don't see full-time wizard school as an option, specially as a good non-magical education becomes more and more important for people to make a living.

[Quantus]

Scale.  The White Council cannot train a lot of wizards using the apprentice model.   Realistically many wizards are not good teachers and thus would not have apprentices.  Many wizards are too busy to have an apprentice.  Any one wizard with apprentices would rarely have more than one apprentice.  A school would enable the same number of wizards to teach a lot more apprentices. 

If we can assume a School would be a viable option at all, why are we assuming a single Master cannot adequately teach multiple Apprentices?

This is the biggest argument against a school.  if every wizard has a completely different approach, then it is hard to teach them collectively.   The success of the boot camp implies that this is not an insurmountable problem, but it would certainly complicate things.  I think it would be inevitable that any academy system would make make wizards "style" more consistent over time.

Just a Devil's Advocate statement, but Keep in mind that the boot camp was a /Warden/ training camp, which is a simultaneously a more broad and more specific skill-set than just being a Wizard; there's a lot of non-magical material (like what we saw Harry teaching in AAAA Wizardry) and a lot of .  It's entirely possible all those younglings were already apprentices (or at the very least being watched to become one) and so may well have already had some basic one-on-one training (formally or not).

[Rasins]

Also, don't forget that those who were at Camp Kaboom were already full wizards.

[dspringer1]

If we can assume a School would be a viable option at all, why are we assuming a single Master cannot adequately teach multiple Apprentices?

If you assume a master takes several apprentices at the same time, they certainly could.  The problem with a single master is that when the apprentices skills begin to diverge, they start to need separate training.  A single master with Molly and Harry as students would find their individual strengths to rapidly diverge, limiting the opportunities for co-training. 

In a college setting, molly would move to the advanced class in veils while Harry stayed in the basic class.  That is the strength of the college groups.  You can cluster several students together on any one topic that have comparable skills. 

Do not get me wrong, these classes might be only five students in size.  I doubt any wizard class beyond general education lectures would have more than ten students.  but that still means a given group of wizards can turn out 5X the apprentices of a single master. 

[Quantus]

If you assume a master takes several apprentices at the same time, they certainly could.  The problem with a single master is that when the apprentices skills begin to diverge, they start to need separate training.  A single master with Molly and Harry as students would find their individual strengths to rapidly diverge, limiting the opportunities for co-training. 

In a college setting, molly would move to the advanced class in veils while Harry stayed in the basic class.  That is the strength of the college groups.  You can cluster several students together on any one topic that have comparable skills. 

Do not get me wrong, these classes might be only five students in size.  I doubt any wizard class beyond general education lectures would have more than ten students.  but that still means a given group of wizards can turn out 5X the apprentices of a single master.

The sense I get is that Harry, and by extension Molly, was unusually isolated as an Apprentice.  I would have assumed a certain amount of collaboration with their peers (to the limits of the masters' individual personalities) when the issue is disparate skill sets.  Homeschooling coalitions do this pretty often these days. 

[wyltok]

Do not get me wrong, these classes might be only five students in size.  I doubt any wizard class beyond general education lectures would have more than ten students.  but that still means a given group of wizards can turn out 5X the apprentices of a single master.

We know two topics in which wizard tradition has been firmly entrenched: wards and defensive mental magic. In Summer Knight, an "old dame Warden" showed the whole council a list of newly-developed warding theories meant to incorporate additional protection against vampires. Similarly, the wards set up by corpsetaker in Ghost Story were identifiable by Harry as previous generations of the same principles he knows. Speaking of Corpsetaker, in Dead Beat, she recognize Harry's mental defenses as being part of the Council's standard doctrine, and she mentions they've been using it for a century.

I've always thought of the White Council as a Certification and Continuing Professional Education system more than anything else. Once the Council recognizes you as having the potential to be an apprentice, you are assigned a coach to help you develop your own style as well as make it compatible enough with the Council's generally accepted theories of magic until you are recognized as a Wizard. Once a Wizard, it is your responsibility to go to the Council Meetings to keep yourself up to date with whatever new theories they present to you.

[...]I thought, well if the wizards are going to exist on this world then they are going to have some kind of organization of one kind or another, and the White Council ends up being kind of the Bar organization for the wizards you know.  If you want to be someone who's taken seriously you have to show up, you have to pass their tests, you gota put in your time helping out, and then you are recognized as a full wizard.

Unfortunately, that's not good enough anymore. Wizards of the White Council are still too rare to catch everyone with the potential to hurt others before they go Sith. Which is why they have relied on their allies, organizations like the Venatori and the Paranet to do the flagging for them. But that's not going to be enough in the future, I don't think.

[Quantus]

We know two topics in which wizard tradition has been firmly entrenched: wards and defensive mental magic. In Summer Knight, an "old dame Warden" showed the whole council a list of newly-developed warding theories meant to incorporate additional protection against vampires. Similarly, the wards set up by corpsetaker in Ghost Story were identifiable by Harry as previous generations of the same principles he knows. Speaking of Corpsetaker, in Dead Beat, she recognize Harry's mental defenses as being part of the Council's standard doctrine, and she mentions they've been using it for a century.

I've always thought of the White Council as a Certification and Continuing Professional Education system more than anything else. Once the Council recognizes you as having the potential to be an apprentice, you are assigned a coach to help you develop your own style as well as make it compatible enough with the Council's generally accepted theories of magic until you are recognized as a Wizard. Once a Wizard, it is your responsibility to go to the Council Meetings to keep yourself up to date with whatever new theories they present to you.

Unfortunately, that's not good enough anymore. Wizards of the White Council are still too rare to catch everyone with the potential to hurt others before they go Sith. Which is why they have relied on their allies, organizations like the Venatori and the Paranet to do the flagging for them. But that's not going to be enough in the future, I don't think.

I agree with your assessment, though I'd submit that only the Venatori have played that role so far but that the much, MUCH wider and more well-attended Net of the Paranet will go a long way to mitigating the scale issues you see.  They are just too new at this point, and as of I think it was TC where Harry and Luccio mention it, the paranet hadnt yet developed a huge amount of support in the Council beyond Harry himself.