Infographic: Famous Fictional Schools

Posted on 7 July, 2015 by Nate Hoffelder in Infographic // 7 Comments

Here's something fun. Did you ever wonder just often a school is used as a setting in a story?

It happens more than you think - just not in books. An infographic crossed me desk this morning which lists famous schools from fiction, including Hogwarts, Crunchem Hall, and Forks High.

The graphic is regrettably biased towards schools shown in movies and tv shows, but that is not a sign of a poorly made graphic. No, I think it reflects that schools aren't used in books as a setting nearly as often as you might think. I found a wikia focused on fictional schools, and from what I can see movies and tv shows are much more likely to be set in a school (it's an ideal setting for a horror movie like The Breakfast Club, for example).

Books, on the other hand, tend to focus more on what a kid might do outside of school than in. That's an interesting contrast, isn't it?

Is there a fictional school that you think should have been included?

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Becki // 7 July, 2015 at 1:51 pm // Reply

What about Lev Grossman’s series “The Magicians”? The first book mostly takes place in Brakebills Academy, somewhere in New York. The other books also refer back to that training ground.

fahirsch // 7 July, 2015 at 6:54 pm // Reply

Tom Brown Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brown%27s_School_Days).
It’s an English book. The story is set in the 1830s at Rugby School, a public school for boys. “Public” meaning private. That was the kind of school that created administrators for the English Empire. I read it about 60 years ago (I went to [what is called] an English School in Argentina, where part of the curricula is in Spanish (as taught in Argentine public schools) and part is in English (as taught in England) and prepares students to take the English General Certificate of Education exams

Mike Hall // 7 July, 2015 at 7:13 pm // Reply
But surely this misses out on the “fictional” criterion? Rugby is a real school and has existed for over 400 years.