The 10 Least Educational (and Most Dangerous) Schools of Nerd-Dom

Hey, kids! Do ya like school? Probably not. I hear you, the tests are a drag, the food ain’t great, even if you brown bag it, and the opposite sex keeps turning you down (we assume).
But you don’t realize how good you have it, because for all your homework and bullying, at least you’re life has never been in danger (we hope). Here are 10 schools where you’ll probably die in awful ways way before you get around to that PSAT. And then you wouldn’t get a good job and your parents will be disappointed, which is even worse.

10) Morning Glory Academy

In the Image comic, the name “Morning Glory Academy” supposedly signifies a top-of-the-line exclusive private school. And parents trip over themselves to send their kids there. Of course, there’s a good chance that agents from the school will kill them once their kids are accepted — it’s happened before. While everyone goes to class like normal, kids are routinely selected for torture, experimentation, and bizarre supernatural rituals. Detention? You’re stuck in a classroom that’s filled with water until you almost drown. A few steps more deadly than nuns whipping rulers at your knuckles.

9) Tromaville High School

OH MY GOD PEOPLE THEY SELL DRUGS HERE. As we learned from an after-school special starring Garfield and the Ninja Turtles, drugs are bad. Mutants, if you ask the Ninja Turtles, are OK, but for the town of Tromaville, they’re deadly (but can be created with a limited, sensible budget). Whether it’s a mutant baby or mutant squirrel or a gang, Tromaville High is a drag. AND it’s in Jersey.

8) Avengers Academy

Avengers Academy is a school only in the sense that children are there without their parents. There are no classes, other than the seemingly endless PE that involves turning into mist or a dinosaur and fighting each other. Accredited by no governing body and employing teachers with extensive criminal backgrounds (isn’t Quicksilver a war criminal?), Avengers Academy is less of a school and more of a halfway house for violent kids where Captain America shows up every few months to wag his finger.

7) Smallville High

I don’t get it. If a town like Dimock, Pennsylvania, can have a documentary made about how its water can catch fire, why isn’t the town of Smallville quarantined? “Oh, so and so just freaked out, got super powers, and eats people and cats.” “Huh, must be them weird meteor rocks THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT.” The first few seasons of Smallville were a parade of corrupted youth gone wild. School revolved around football, the school newspaper, and trying not to be destroyed by a very real and apparently easy-to-ignore threat. And that image above? Innocent student, stripped and crucified in a cornfield. Yeah, they haze.

6) Unseen University

Getting lost on your way to class is legit. You may have got turned around by the auxiliary gym and ended up back by the cooking rooms. But the library at Terry Pratchett’s Unseen U. is infinite. You’ll get lost forever. Who’ll help you? No one, because the faculty is more or less inept and negligent. There is violence with ferrets and hard bread, which is part of the school calendar. Plus its coat of arms looks like a Boy Scout badge for the slower “indoor” kids.

5) Skool

Jhonen Vasquez doesn’t seem to like anything. In Invader Zim, he worked out his feelings towards school. According to Jhonen and the writers, school is dirty, full of dictators, offers vile and rotten food, hides torturous underground classrooms, and happily sends troublemakers to the insane asylum in one of them “crazy buckets.” Education is nonexistent, as are individualized education profiles (legally-mandated programs that improve learning), and kids can get infested with pigeons instead of lice. On the plus side, you can get away with playing videogames in class.

4) Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters/Xavier Institute for Higher Learning/Jean Gray School for Higher Learning

Dear Mutant Students! Welcome to our school, where you’re going to be constantly under attack from mutants, non-mutants, aliens, demons, and robots! Pretty much every day, since the issues where we just go to class don’t sell as well. Of course, we pretend to have a real curriculum, but it’s really mutant-centric and will serve you no purpose in the real world. We even have a room that attacks you, and you’re required to go there!
Even if your mutant power doesn’t have any military application, you’re still required to go! Hope you survive the experience!

3) Miskatonic University

I always got the feeling that there were a lot of regular classes as Miskatonic U, from the Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. It’s supposed to be fairly prestigious and aside from a few bad apples, it’s probably well ranked in the Northeast. Modern writers (and t-shirt sellers) stress the creepiness, and it’s probably very misty during the more humid months, but it probably has a crew team, a good liberal arts curriculum, and some good on-campus dining. Sadly, it also has a copy of the Necronomicon that everyone wants to steal and use for unspeakable evil. But it probably is really pretty in the summer.

2) Sunnydale High

Sunnydale, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is a school that knows what’s up. It’s built on a Hellmouth, so evil shows up every week, and the students are like, “Yeah, demon goat raped my face. Sucked, but that’s Sunnydale.” They brought weapons to graduation to fight a giant snake and that was okay. They voted Buffy “Class Protector” because they got torn apart so often that it was becoming an issue. There were ghosts, werewolves, vampires (every week), witches, burnings, stabbings, and frequent demon appearances. THIS is why people want a voucher system.

1) Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Over the years as we read the Harry Potter books, we saw Hogwarts go from a thriving, respected school where a little bit of magic was behind every corner to a big pile of rocks and dead kids. No marketable skills are taught, although there is a mandatory course every year on EVIL. Children are taught to fight with wands, wands that have the potential to kill, cripple, or madden if the wrong word is uttered (the books with those words are in the library). Trolls and basilisks get in and evil mer-people live in the lake (and a kraken). The whole school isn’t even mapped out – new tunnels are being found all the time. The big tree outside on the lawn kills you. Your kids are not safe here, wizarding families.