The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Wizard Academy
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 The Teacher/Apprentice model is far from outdated even in modern society, and can still win out against group/classroom training in several important ways, many of which I think apply to Magical study as much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:
--- Quote ---The apprentice system may be very old, but that doesn't mean it isn't efficient. If it ain't broken, why fix it?
--- End quote ---
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.
--- Quote ---As magic is often very personal, a personal one on one instruction might just be mandative for some things.
--- End quote ---
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:
--- Quote from: dspringer1 on July 11, 2017, 03:12:31 PM ---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.
--- End quote ---
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?
--- Quote ---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.
--- End quote ---
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).
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