The School Information File
Diversity
copyright 2021 by Dave Van Domelen =============================================================================
"Okay, so I've been noticing a diversity issue here, Grant. Oh, I don't mean the students...there's a few missing demographics, but at this student body size, proportional representation would be one student for some of these groups. Easy to randomly miss those. I mean in the magical training curriculum. That Secret History class makes it pretty clear that there's a
lot of magical traditions, so why aren't they represented in the TRAINING curriculum?"
"Lingering cultural imperialism, basically. And it's actually why some
of those missing demographics are missing..." Grant replied.
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[Note: This idea almost immediately made itself clear to me as something that a Drabble couldn't cover adequately, but at the same time it's too much
of an infodump to try to work into a longer story. So, as a compromise, I
used (without trying to fit into 100 words) a short bit of dialogue that had kicked around in my head as an intro to another info file.]
Before The School
Magical girls are rare. The age range covered by The School draws from
a population of 20 million or so girls, and yet only has around 150
students. Not quite "one in a million," but close. And while girls still
go unnoticed, it's not a bad estimate to say that in a community of under 100,000 you're unlikely to have more than one Magical Girl of school age.
(The trait doesn't strongly run in families as near as anyone can tell, and
is pretty randomly distributed in modern times.)
As a result, in any situation where it's not easy to exchange
information over large distances, efforts tend to be fairly local. A coven here, a temple tradition there. Compounding the problem is that while
Wizards are almost uniformly literate and highly educated due to the nature
of their path to power, magical girls are no more educated or interconnected than typical girls of their society. Wizards could communicate via long established traditions of academic correspondence, could take advantage of their predecessors tomes of knowledge, even form small schools here and there throughout history. But magical girl lore was almost entirely oral and
society made it more difficult for them to even find out that they weren't alone. The deck was stacked against preservation of magical girl
traditions, and they tended to get lost in mundane accounts of magic.
That is not to say that there were never concentrations of magical
girls, but they rarely outlasted their founding generation or left a significant legacy for later magical girls. For instance, Dynastic China saw several small secret schools for magical girls, but they depended on
stability to hide their nature. In times of turmoil, they split up or were even outed and attacked. There are even rumors that one group of magical
girls hid as palace eunuchs in the Qin era, but no substantial evidence
remains in the historical record, and they certainly left no legacy for later magical girls to follow.
Once conditions made it possible for The School to be established, it
was still necessary for someone to take the leap of faith that such an institution would be worth the risk. Especially since the 1700s were pretty patriarchal in most of the world, and you had to get men to care about the plight of women. Powerful "Witches" might have had a strong influence behind the scenes, but they needed at least a few men to play the part of
figureheads. Fortunately, they did convince several Wizards that a school
for those with inherited magic was worthwhile, and the rest is (secret) history.
With The School in place and proving the concept, being the first also meant setting the standards for those that followed. Even without cultural imperialism, most of the later schools around the world would have copied at least some elements of The School's curriculum.
Cultural Imperialism
Of course, timing is everything. If you look at mundane education in
the 1700s and 1800s, a "modern" education meant a European style education. Colonies were forced to adopt the system of their colonizers, if only to let their peoples compete on something close to an even footing. And later on, uncolonized nations wishing to modernize had only a selection of European
(and American) models to follow.
As other regional schools for magical girls were established, they followed the spirit of the times, and copied The School with only minor adaptations for cultural differences. Even in the 21st Century, the biggest differences among the major schools have to do with the mundane curriculum (which has to match the host area's reasonably well), not the magical curriculum.
Myth of the True Magi
Merely copying The School wouldn't have locked out cultural diversity if The School hadn't done so on its own, of course. As with many such efforts,
it started with the best of intentions and a massive dose of privilege.
As The School really got going in the late 1800s, they decided to try to recreate the original magical tradition, the path of the so-called True
Magi. This effort was parallel to and somewhat influenced by occult revival movements such as Theosophy. They saw many of the older myths as being corrupted retellings of what little knowledge remained of the world before
the fall of magic. The plan was to use what little was known in an attempt
to reconstruct what had gone before...why reinvent the wheel when you can rediscover it instead?
Unfortunately, the idea of being heirs to the tradition of a single True Magi society was as attractive as the more racist ideas of the occult
revival, and the researchers started from the assumption of a unified single pre-fall magical culture, despite a lack of evidence one way or another. Starting from that conclusion, evidence was gathered in an attempt to distill the True Magi ways from a combination of folklore and the unreliable
testimony of those who claimed to have survived since before the fall.
Elements that fit the model, such as color attunement, became part of the canon. Other elements, including a lot of "primitive superstitions," were rejected as being later corruptions or outright errors. While there was very little overt racism involved, privilege was almost never checked, and the
True Magi culture had an awful lot in common with idealizations of then- current (White) American and European culture.
By the early 20th Century, the True Magi theory of magical instruction
had taken firm hold at The School and its imitators. No "serious" school for magical girls taught or even mentioned systems that had not been accepted
into the True Magi model. Most wizards and magical girls turned up their
noses at magical traditions that didn't fit their ideas of Real Magic. Any that could be shown to work were explained away as doing so by accident (much like Mark Gray's equations were determined to not really be Words of Power). The magic, if you have it, is real. But there's the Proper way to train in
its use, and then there's everything else.
Modern Reforms
Just as mundane society is starting to recognize and value cultural diversity, magical society is slowly admitting that there's no evidence of an ancient monoculture for magic, and it's more likely that the pre-fall society had multiple traditions. One factor that has gotten even the most hidebound academic Wizards to change their minds is the argument that a diverse
pre-fall culture would better explain the contradictions in surviving
records. If they didn't all agree on a single way before the fall, why
should they agree afterwards? The self-proclaimed survivors of the age are still considered unreliable sources, but it is accepted now that they're not necessarily lying about how they think magic works.
On the other hand, The School's curriculum has WORKED for the last century. It is effective. Students learn to control and hide their powers, and if there's the occasional failure...no system is perfect. The supporting curriculum, such as the Secret History of Magic, is being adjusted to de-emphasize the True Magi elements, but the actual training has yet to
change much.
The larger schools are trying to find a way to change their main magical curriculum to better match their local cultures, but institutional inertia
does tend to slow this down a bit. The major school in sub-Saharan Africa is making the most progress in this regard, as part of a general de-colonizing move. However, it is also the newest and smallest of the major schools, so
it has less institutional inertia to overcome.
Branch Schools
One thing The School and its peers have been trying as an interim
measure is the establishment of small "branch campus" study groups, either creating them from scratch or reaching out to previously independent groups. Since these smaller schools lack the resources of the large schools, they
rely more on hiding in plain sight and staying small, often being openly dedicated to "new age" or "indigenous religion" magic studies. But among
their talentless mundane students will hide a core of magical girls, who
attend mundane schools or engage in homeschooling during the day and study
real magic after school and on weekends.
Because of the difficulty in hiding novices from scrying, students at these schools often start out at The School or one of its peers, then
transfer into a specialty school after Secunda or even Tertia. Students
intent on such a transfer but not yet ready for it may take special
instruction outside of the major school's grounds once or twice a week, or
the instructors come to the school, depending on the nature of the magical tradition and the people involved. The advances in wearable cloaking charms
do make these schools more feasible, but trusting small children to not lose something is rarely a good long term plan.
Some of the "missing demographics" Mark Gray noticed are because those students are studying at a branch school.
One branch school that draws students from The School is the North American Tribal Magic School, or just "Tribal School." While there is no single "North American Indigenous Magical Tradition," the Tribal School
focuses on spirtual pathways originating in the multitude of indigenous cultures in North America. Its enrollment rarely exceeds single digits, with as many different traditions as there are students, but there's also more instructors than students...preserving cultural identity is considered important enough to justify the resources. They make heavy use of teleportation magic and encourage students to make bonds with their ancestral lands, when such lands remain reasonably un-desecrated. Officially, all of
the students are being homeschooled for their mundane education, with
parental cooperation.
Another example is the ongoing attempt to revive Shinto magical
practices in Japan, with magical girls becoming temple maidens, or mikos. A handful of temples in modern Japan are genuinely concecrated and their
magical auras serve to hide any temple maidens in training from detection. Warding amulets for use outside temple grounds are made in the form of traditional charms that the girls must wear when attending mundane school. There are only a handful of miko magical girls to date, as the lifestyle is seen as rather old-fashioned and it's difficult to get preteen girls
interested in it. More commonly, Japan's equivalent of Advanced Squads may include a group of mikos working outside the grounds of their main school at
a temple.
There are currently attempts to found a branch school for Vodun/Vodou/ Voodoo and related fusion traditions, but they're still negotiating affiliations and whether it should be one branch school or two.
Still, despite these movements, the majority of young magical girls continue to be trained in a twraked version of the True Magi path from the 1920s. Attempts at teaching magical girls in diverse traditions have not all been successful, and while none of the branch schools has failed badly enough to cause concern, they're still very much on probation in the minds of the magical establishment.
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Author's Notes:
For more about The School, my take on magical girls, see:
http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/School/index.html
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