Why would a magic school novel set in the planet Earth make a country only have one or two schools?

Why would a magic school novel set on planet Earth make a country only have one or two schools when in reality there should be more like a normal school in the real world? Does anyone have a plausible explanation?

such as Harry Potter or Jujutsu Taisen is often has one or two school in one country but it is not plausible when you see our real world school where there are so many school more than 1000 in one country

Usually it's because the population either aware of, or capable of using magic is small enough that it only needs one school.

Alternatively, if magic was sufficiently low status/value it might have only one main school that actually taught it, with a bunch of individual teachers around as well.

Alternatively, alternatively, if magic is traditionally taught master-apprentice, a magic school might be an experiment and the first of its kind.

Another possibility might be that the teaching of magic requires certain specifics that are bound to a limited number of locations—perhaps it can only be done at a confluence of major ley-lines, for example.

May be that the country is small or poor enough that specialized schools are uncommon.

Some countries in RL are tiny.

Liechtenstein has nine secondary schools.

I think we may be coming at this backwards. There's two basic ways to do world-building. One is to design the basic 'rules' of the universe and extrapolate the societies and people who might emerge from them. The other is to decide what structure you want and create the 'rules' to match that.

So, I'm assuming you want to have characters at this magic school and have there be only one per state. Are you also wanting it to mimic the real world political structure? If not, you could do small states each dominated by a single magical school, which tend to be rivals?

But more broadly, should magic users be high status, or low status? Rare, or common? You can still have your main character be a low status magic user (common/muggle born or whatever) in a generally high status group (or the reverse, though that's far less common). But knowing the role you want this school to fill in your society is one way to figure this out.

Alternatively, if you've already designed your 'rules' than look for ways for that to flow out of things. Whether it's the ley lines suggestion above, or magic being quasi-genetic and mages try to restrict their own numbers to increase their relative power. Or magic being a limited resource which governments/mage guilds strictly regulate access to?

Thank you

I'd echo ECD's first comment. Just how rare is magic? If there's only enough magically-adept kids in Britain to justify one school, then Hogwarts is it.

>such as Harry Potter or Jujutsu Kaisen

Harry Potter largely makes no sense (a hot take, i know) but in Jujutsu Kaisen, the number of sorcerers is specifically very low, and Japan has an extremely large sorcerer population compared to the rest of the world. They still have 2 or 3 schools for all of Japan.

But i think it's also a matter of what you consider a school, precisely. Apprenticeship is a common form of schooling and it doesn't really require a school. Harry Potter makes schools explicit sources of teaching magic and with an extremely long and deeply ingrained tradition, because otherwise the answer would simply be stuff like home-teaching.

Edited by devak on Sep 17th 2022 at 11:57:26 AM

Or you can have multiple systems - going by side-materials, Septimus Heap has both magic education in school and apprenticeships. They are not dedicated magic schools, though.