Tropes - Magic School

I was thinking today (or rather, last week when I wrote the bulk of this post), on my drive home, about all the different fantasy novels where some youngster discovers he/she has magical talents and must (or chooses to) go to school to have those talents trained.  I've come up with a fairly long list, just from memory of books I've read.  There are also a lot of military academies, spy academies, and training scenarios that feel like schools, though the setting may not be a traditional school.

Actual "magic" schools:

• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
• The Earthsea books by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Magicians' Guild books by Trudi Canavan
• The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham (sort of, well, one of the main characters escapes from one early on)
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (White Tower, Black Tower)
• Od Magic by Patricia McKillip
• The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks
• The Collegia Magica books by Carol Berg

Monasteries, military academies, mixed magic and non-magic training, and other "nontraditional" educational settings:

• The Soldier Son trilogy by Robin Hobb
• The Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher (couple of volumes, anyway)
• Farlander by Col Buchanan (interesting twist in this one)
• The Green Rider series by Kristen Britain (Green Rider training is a little like this)
• Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn (Tribe training is a little like this, maybe not as centralized)
• The Golden Key by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott (Grijalva training)
• The King Rolen's Kin trilogy by Rowena Cory Daniells (monastery)
• The Left Hand of God and sequels by Paul Hoffman (monastery/religious order)

This is not meant, of course, to be a complete list.  Coming-of-age stories (or "special boy" stories, as I often call them) are popular in the fantasy genre.  Young people are often in school, or training, and so it makes sense that if you're writing about their lives, you're writing about their training.

Naturally, in addition to the protagonist, there's also an antagonist, or group of them.  Draco Malfoy, Ambrose in the Rothfuss books, etc.  The antagonist may end up teaming up with the protagonist in the end.  Sometimes not.  But whenever I see a young person in a fantasy novel, and he or she is in school and has a dust-up with some other character early on, I can almost always see where the novel is going.  (If you want something unexpected to happen in this type of story, try Farlander by Col Buchanan.  I won't give it away, and you do have to read until the end.  But I'm looking forward to the sequel of that one.)