#and you can be bullied in vocational school and at the workplace also.

[mordcore]

just saw someone say "bullying ≠ a lifetime of abuse" and i just gotta mention: what a load of crap. bullying is abuse. and if you're bullied for a lifetime you have a lifetime of abuse. plain and simple.

[ruffoverthinksthings]

Since most of the famous royals go to Auradon, what about the commoner children? What is their school life? Are they like in-city kids with less funding than the royals? And the half-fae kids in these schools, are they treated badly?

The answer is, it varies depending on where you are.

Most upper class Auradonians send their children to establishments similar to Auradon Prep, or other types of prestigious academies, such as the modern day Knights barracks where they apprentice to become commissioned officers, superiors over the rest of the Royal Guard straight off the bat, or the fancier version of military school in the modern day, and sending misbehaving progeny to the military to smarten up in olden days.

Excluding home education, Mandatory Education for middle/working class individuals generally takes on three different forms, one of which has two subgroups:

I. Privatized Education

Generally only afforded by the middle class, or working class with scholarships, sponsorships, and/or connections to the societal rungs above them, these are the middle ground between the “best of the absolute best” schools like Auradon Prep, and the less well funded and oftentimes less prestigious public schools I’ll be mentioning below.

It’s the above average in every way, really: colleges don’t raise eyebrows when they see you studied there, but they will generally keep you in mind during admissions; it’s not likely to make you the center of attention at a party if you mention your alma mater, and you might have to explain what it is and what it’s known for, but no one will look any lesser about you for it; and you generally have a similar, very high-achieving, and holistic education like the Royals of Auradon Prep do, which encourages such values as independence, critical thinking, and philosophy alongside ethics.

To give you an idea, their Civics classes oftentimes includes hypothetical situations, essays, and Socratic debates where they are asked to commentate on, dissect, and criticize past decisions, such as that of the Magic Ban. One of the key differences is, in the private schools outside of Auradon’s Ivy League equivalent, the students are framed as average citizens answering referendums or wording letters to the executive branch, not the monarchs that proclaimed the order and whose signature is on the paper.

On a side note, they make up the bulk of Auradon’s high school Tourney league, which tends to be a VERY big deal to the institution and the location they are based in, wherever you go.

II. Public Education

The mandatory educational program that every single Auradonian citizen is supposed to have at the bare minimum. It emphasizes the three basic skills--reading, writing, and arithmetic--but also includes a very heavy focus on ethics, philosophy, and history, oftentimes retelling the stories of their many monarchs rises to fame and their adventures (read: Disney movies, except it’s quite literally history class).

Schools, depending on their geographic location and local government, are allowed to either specialize in preparing their students for IT, STEM, and their future college degrees; or with boosting their local industries and businesses, generally agriculture, alongside numerous exercises and events meant to foster stronger, closer ties to their community, alongside maintaining its health.

While in theory and in the constitution, every school is supposed to meet a set number of minimum standards and practices, and will have its operation on probation and intervention, then threatened with shutdown if they can’t meet the standards still, you might have guessed by now that it doesn’t quite work that way in practice...

A. City

Ironically, being “inner city” is a GOOD thing in Auradon.

It’s only been two decades since the giant industrialization rush, and while many of the giants have either fallen, cut down their activities significantly, or been rendered obsolete, a LOT of these industries are still around, still require a good number of employees, who they can pay great wages, and who said employees then use to buy housing close to their workplace, raise families in them, and desire good schools to send the children too.

Both by geographic proximity and majority of Auradon’s economic activity being focused in the metropolitan cities, many of these public schools do quite well for themselves, comfortably reaching the minimum standards if they aren’t able to match up to the most prestigious privatized academies--those tend to be the exception, though, like Arendelle Science High School which has very strong backing from its government, and mutual interest from its business interests to attract and more importantly, keep inventors, geniuses, and savants.

Depending on where you are, the city public school is just as viable a choice as private, and some of them do carry a better reputation than the latter.

Blame it on Auradon’s love for the exceptional, but there’s much to be said about being a notable graduate from a school that’s required to take in everybody VS one that can be selective about who they let in, and with much more means to groom them.

B. Countryside

And THIS is where the “inner city” effect is most strongly seen. As I mentioned above, the industrial boom is still around in Auradon (if slowing down and making its start towards a Green Revolution), and obviously, those workers didn’t come from thin air--they were from the countrysides and remote villages, either within that nation’s borders, or emigrating from them on whichever country’s “Dream” got them to bite.

Due to the lack of development, infrastructure, and interest (until recently) in the countryside, majority of the public schools here suffer, oftentimes falling below minimum standards, having poor facilities, or the inability to retain staff, either by their own choice, or because of external reasons like needing to have income to pay the rent and their own food.

There is also a marked lack of interest in government supervision and inspection of them--the competent supervisors are generally lured to the AIL (Auradon Ivy League) or better private schools due to pay and the lifestyles there, the ones that wish to actually follow through with the law lack the means and the support to enforce it, and then there are the ones that wish to do away with the standards altogether and impose their idea of what is a “proper” education with impunity.

There are a handful of schools out there that are basically focused on producing a new generation of basket weavers, ideal housewives, and/or farmers, even if they’re supposed to be learning how to read--but then again, what is there to read to them in the first place...?

C. Side Note

Both make up the minority of Auradon’s high school Tourney league, largely due to logistic and economic issues. There’s only so many teams that can be allowed on the official league match ups at once, and many of them have players that can be conveniently shipped off wherever and whenever, and whose schools have the training and equipment to keep them at the top of their game. (Pun intended.)

There’s also the matter of sports scholarships. Many of the great players end up leaving their old teams and lives behind entirely if the opportunity to study someplace better shows itself--and really, no one blames them.

III. Mentorship/Vocational Education

And finally, the most traditional sort of education that still exists, is becoming an apprentice for some sort of skilled occupation becoming a carpenter, a blacksmith, or perhaps one of the royal scribes, for those that really want a fast, guaranteed, if tedious track into a government job and perhaps a future seat there.

If you’re equipped for it, you can’t go wrong with having to take down and record all the going-ons in the states and having to file, retrieve, and disseminate that information. “No one knows what’s going on in the world better than the man who has to put it all to paper,” as the saying goes.

There’s also a much larger scale effort with some companies training highly specialized work forces, such as the increasingly complex and difficult nature of manufacturing cars, home appliances, and technology in Auradon.

Like in the real world, it used to be you had an electrician, an engineer, and a mechanic, and now you need someone who’s all three for one product line specifically.

P.S. Half-Fae kids depends again.

Those that are extremely human like such as half-elves generally get along just fine even in the most remote countrysides, as the villages tend to have been living with them and their full-blooded Fae parents for centuries, if they don’t have some sort of symbiotic bond with them.

They’re a little stranger and different than the humans, but not by THAT much--think of it like a mostly Caucasian American population who lives comfortably with their Italian American and African American fellows.

For those that have less than ideal relationships with the humans in the region (i.e. demons), they do tend to be bullied and treated with superstition, but eventually the kids get used to them and they become part of any of the normal school cliques and social rungs that their fully human classmates are also part of, if they don’t own it and take advantage of it.

You’ll find more than a couple of half-demon kids who openly embrace the “unholy” images of their supernatural side; leather jackets with “HELLSPAWN” behind them are rather popular, as are the requisite goats, fire, and pentagrams.

Sometimes, their heritage isn’t even acknowledged at all, except in passing, and they’re treated as equals, individual personalities and exceptional abilities notwithstanding.

“In the end, we’re all in the back of the same dung cart, so what’s the point?”