Education
A common trait of magicians is that, no matter how spontaneously their abilities manifest, they must learn to use them. Occasionally this is reserved for people with innate abilities, but the typical magician is surrounded by books in his tower owing to his studies. Fictionally, it provides a way for the writer to ensure that his wizard characters can not do everything, thus eliminating conflict from the story.
When the magician is not the main character, this may not be visible, but magician protagonists including Ursula K. Le Guin's Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea and Harry Potter have gone to wizardry schools. Others have taken on the roles of apprentices, such as Haku in the movie Spirited Away. In the movie Willow, Willow receives a magical wand but has great difficulty learning to use it; only with the tutoring of Fin Raziel is he able to master magic. Harry Potter, like many young wizards in his universe, accidentally casts spells before he is taught to do so properly.
Another means of learning can be books; weighty, ancient tomes, often called grimoires, which may have magical properties of their own. Conan the Barbarian's sorcerer foes often gained powers from such books, whose strangeness was often underscored by their strange bindings. In worlds where wizardry is not an innate trait, the scarcity of these strange books may be a factor; in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Prince Rupert seeks out the books of the magician Prospero to learn magic. The same occurs in the Dungeons and Dragons-based novel series Dragonlance Chronicles, wherein Raistlin Majere seeks out the books of the sorcerer Fistandantilus.
Some wizards, even after training, continue to learn new and/or invent spells and items/beings/objects or rediscover old ones that were lost to time, such as in the case of Marvel Comics' Dr. Strange, who continued to learn about magic in the Marvel Universe even after being named Sorcerer Supreme. He often encountered creatures that hadn't been seen in the world for centuries or longer. Likewise, Dr. Doom, who would combine magic with science, also continued to pursue magical knowledge long after becoming an accomplished master of the magical arts. Fred and George Weasley, of the Harry Potter universe, were notorious pranksters, but also had the capability of inventing new items based on the education they received during their tenure in Hogwarts, with so much success that by the time of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince they have created a line of defensive items that was being bought in bulk by the Ministry of Magic, foremost among other clients.
It may be impossible, in a given work, to determine whether a given practice of magic is innate, because the length of time needed for the study, the scarcity of the books or teachers, or the preciousness of the materials required mean that most characters are necessarily excluded. In some fictional worlds, such as David Eddings' The Belgariad, magic is inherently dangerous, and many of those who develop the talent for magic destroy themselves in learning how to use it, thus limiting their numbers even further.
Read more about this topic: Magician (fantasy)
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“As for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but ... the nine Muses and the three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase. Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)