Worldbuilding: The Fantasy School Problem

[dreadlordmrson]

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My comment:
I have a world I play around with together with a friend. Not something to publish a book for, just a "for fun" world for play.
The magic levels are so high there that in any random village there's going to be a few peasants that have a "cantrip" or two, even if it's only the magelight spell that lets you place a ball of light somewhere that feeds off ambient magic to stay lit. Though having permanent accessible light without electricity is already world-changing enough on its own.
While magic is highly accessible on a low level, the more study you put in, the more you can get out of it.
But this world is highly... scattered. There's no major empires. No industrialization or mass transit options. There's certainly no centralized schools, so you do mostly learn things through parents or guilds or paying a tutor. And when it comes to learning from more powerful mages, it's mostly going to be than last one. If you want to learn magic from somewhere else, you have to convince them it's worth their while. And the more skilled they are, the more exclusive they're likely to be about it, and the more likely they are to have other things to do with their time.

The main character I play with is a woman lucky enough to learn her magic from an eccentric scholar-type mage who liked to take in orphans and finance caring for them by charging richer people to learn magic. She was abandoned at his home by her mother, and learned magic growing up on his lands. Her teacher's methods were mostly to do his own studies and occasionally come out to give study work to his paid students plus any of the orphans who were trying to learn magic. More and harder work the more potential he thought they had.
It's a very informal and unstructured method, but it did result in quite a few mid and upper tier mages for that world. Even if some of them come out of it resenting their grumpy and unsocial teacher and the way he made them rewrite that essay comparing the mana flows of Osward's Magic Circle under full moon light vs noontime sun THREE TIMES because their testing wasn't 'rigorous' enough and they flubbed some of the math.
Also sometimes he'd host an educational lecture and boy it sure did seem like a bunch of those were just excuses to rant about how stupid his other scholar friends/penpals were for believing THAT ridiculous theory when clearly THIS is what explains things properly.

Playing around with different ideas in how education works in fantasy worlds is honestly so much fun and people who just throw a school setting together without thinking about it are missing out.

ETA:
Man I forgot to even bring up the character's sister, who's a magical healer AND a trained doctor, because healing is so much more effective when you know how the body works. CharA technically can use healing magic too, but almost never does except for very minor injuries because she doesn't have that training and doesn't want to mess herself up. Botched healing can grow bones wrong, cause cancer, along with numerous other major issues. Better to stick to the easy things and leave serious problems for the professionals. And she has personal reasons to avoid learning medical magic more seriously. Which would be more reasonable if she didn't travel alone in the wilderness and fight monsters for years of her life.