A Deadly Education

Class and wealth inequality are significant contemporary issues in our world. Novik’s novel analogizes the “haves and have-nots” concept within the novel by constructing the enclave system and highlighting the struggles of those who exist outside of it. As the novel’s narrator, Galadriel is aware and critical of both the origins and the effects of the enclave system and the way it shapes the school’s social hierarchy and resource allocation. The difference in privilege manifests in three primary ways: security, service from others, and access to resources.

El explains the school originated as a way for the enclaves to educate and protect their children from the mals infesting the outside world. The school was built partially in the void to allow its architects to seal it off from mals. El explains, “The enclaves built the school because outside is worse […] As much as I roll my eyes at the placards everywhere, the design’s really effective. The school is only just barely connected to the actual world, in one single place: the graduation gates. Which are surrounded by layers on layers of magical wards and artifice barriers” (19). This was necessary because “Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you’re an indie kid who doesn’t get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that” (19).

Unfortunately, the machinery that was supposed to clear the graduation hall broke quickly and often, leading to enormous losses in the graduating classes. El explains that the presence of non-enclave students was meant as an intentional solution to this problem:

London enclave more or less organized a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats—the dorm rooms became significantly smaller—and opened the place up to independent students […]And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out alive almost all of the time—their survival rate usually hovers around eighty percent, a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home. There are so many weaker and less protected wizards around them, and even in the graduation hall, the mals can’t catch all the salmon swimming upstream (258).

As El explains, life outside of an enclave is so dangerous and difficult that independent wizards have a lot of incentive to try to form alliances and earn spots within enclaves. Students who gain enough favor from an enclave to be offered a spot after graduation may be able to bring their families with them into the protection of the enclaves. The novel depicts the enclave kids as being largely unaware of or indifferent to the way the system works. El tells Orion:

Your mate Chloe has friends who offer to taste her food and get her supplies. When she does a project, she can get help for the asking from the best students in the place, and she doesn’t have to help them in return. She probably has two kids walk her back to her room at night, when she finally leaves her permanently reserved place on the sofa in there (107).

The incentives for earning favor from the enclave kids are so significant and so entrenched that the Scholomance has an unofficial “track” or major/focus that some students choose:

Enclavers generally club together in groups of ten and trade all their maintenance shifts to one kid in exchange for the promise that the kid gets to join one of their alliances at graduation time. We call that maintenance track, even though it’s strictly unofficial, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to get into an enclave after graduation. They’re happy to let in anyone who’s willing to literally do the shit work, and maintenance-track kids come out with practical experience in patching up the same kind of infrastructure that the big enclaves use. But it’s also one of the best ways to die. Maintenance-track kids end up skipping around half their lessons, so they’re always on the razor’s edge of failing dangerously, and they miss out on a lot of theory and advanced spells (110).

In this way, the enclave system creates its own ‘blue-collar’ workers—a class of students who cannot compete magically with the enclavers but who do the dangerous, physical labor that ensures the safety of the upper, more magically-educated class.

The final aspect of this is the access to resources, primarily mana. As this guide discusses in the symbols and motifs section, enclave students are able to draw upon a generational wealth of mana that has been produced and stored by students for years before them. Throughout the novel El, along with Aadhya and Liu, participate in physical and mental exercise to build and store mana. The enclave kids, freed from this requirement due to their massive power-sinks and generous power-sharers, and additionally freed from the dangerous requirements of maintenance shifts, have both more time and more power to funnel into their studies and projects. This ensures that they learn the highest-level spells, complete the most impressive projects, and earn the top spots in the class. They are better prepared and bettered shielded when graduation begins, which gives them far higher odds at surviving the graduation ceremony—after which they return to the safety of their enclaves. These are levels of privilege, security, access, and resources that independent students do not have.