Since its inception, the Estate has faced the problem of what to do with gifted, quickened, and special children that they identified in the course of their investigations. Parents and guardians could be bribed with promises of a better education or even “junior” Morrison Fellowship Prizes, but what to do with the children? They were too young and untested to work at the Estate. They knew too much to allow them completely unsupervised childhoods (that’s how they got on the Estate’s radar in the first place). The recursion known as the Schoolhouse was the answer to their predicament.
The Schoolhouse was created by fictional leakage, built on stories told about places of learning over the centuries, from a sacred fire where youths were taught the rites of hunting and gathering to modern dreams of science laboratories unconstrained by public education budget cuts; the Schoolhouse has seen it all. The Administrator of the Schoolhouse has to power to rearrange the architecture itself, to pick and choose from the hundreds of variations the best learning environment for each subject crafted from millennium of the dreams and hopes of eager students. The Administrator, with the help of the Estate, has chosen cutting edge science labs that would not look out of place in Anime high school, soaring Baroque conservatories for the music department, a scale model of the Globe Threatre for the drama department, and a Greek gymnasium for the PE teachers and students. The Schoolhouse goes out of its way to be a perfect place for parents and administrators. The Estate has named the current incarnation of the Schoolhouse the Doctor Sanders Memorial Charter School (in memorial for one of the people who died the night that Carter Morrison created Ardeyn).
Never one to fall into the “too good to be true” trap, the Estate sent teams of agents to thoroughly explore every inch and every nook and cranny of the Schoolhouse before they allowed the first students to enter. A team of agents are still assigned to the security of the recursion, a duty that has been nicknamed “babysitting” since nothing bad ever happens beyond the normal drama of teenage life and the odd mishap in the science lab.
Wise students have learned that every “good” classroom has a source of light, from a campfire in a cave to the florescent lights of the labs. When teachers or Estate agents aren’t looking, those fires can flicker and if they die, then the bogymen will crawl out. Just as the classrooms are built on the hopes and dreams of students, so the basements, lost hallways, and dark places are built on the fears and terrors that school has always invoked, and since one of those primal terrors is that “nobody will understand”, all monsters and even evidence of attacks disappear before an authority figure sees them.
Since it’s a recursion, quickened individuals could theoretically translate into the Schoolhouse instead of using the inapposite gate near the Estate campus, but they would be stuck in the bodies of teenagers.