Martin’s School

 

Named after the late superhero Pyroman and constructed in 1948 shortly before the end of the Worlds War, Martin’s School looks as avant garde as it is. A 111 floor art nouveau skyscraper, easily the tallest building in Joyous Harbor, Martin’s is not what one typically envisions a school looking like. It’s undulating stone façade, inspired by the Casa Mila in Barcelona, and stained-glass honeycomb windows are very far from the traditional image of red brick schoolhouses.

 

Before Martin’s School, the education of superhumans was largely heterogeneous. The superhuman boom of the early 20th century was unprecedented. Educators had no choice but to experiment and play by ear. Some superhumans were educated in schools and universities the same as basics. Some gave up education entirely for making a living off plying their powers. Some sought an education outside the system because they feared harming others with their powers, because they feared persecution, or because they felt that they were the only ones that understood what they needed to learn to better utilize their powers in the world. 

 

Books on autodidactism became best-sellers and their writers world-famous. Specialized tutors offered their services to superhumans that feared entering the public space. Several of these writers and tutors joined together to become the founders of Martin’s and combined the best practices from around the world to create a system they called mainstreaming.

 

In mainstreaming, students work through a general curriculum as well as an individualized curriculum tailored to their specific powers, capabilities, and proclivities. General curriculum related to individualized curriculum like a mainstream to tributaries, hence the name mainstreaming.

 

Mainstreaming demanded the most out of teachers. Under mainstreaming, they not only had to prepare and teach traditional classes but classes never before taught in the history of mankind. An educator could teach math as a general curriculum, and then teach an individualized curriculum for telepathic superhumans where mathematical calculations were used to develop mental control. An educator could teach civics as a general curriculum, and then teach an individualized curriculum for flying superhumans where they learned how to safely and legally navigate between airspace borders.

 

Mainstreaming challenged educators like nothing before. But it was a challenge that needed to be met. Superpowers had changed the world from science to industry to politics. It was now education’s turn to change. And change it did, and for the better. Mainstreaming is now the standard model for education worldwide be it for superhumans or basics. But while mainstreaming is now common, in the 40’s it was a radical, untested idea. 

 

Martin’s School’s Contact Education program, currently under Dr. Tracey Jefferson, is also a hallmark of the school. The Contact Education program pairs students with mentors from outside the educational system. Students can learn from experts with similar powersets and experiences and prepare for life after school. There are some things a prospective superhero can only learn from an active superhero. The success of Martin’s Contact Education program is due to the interway (it would be rather hard to send a student halfway around the world for an hour of instruction and recall them otherwise) and to the school’s warm relations with the Statesmen, who have always been the glue holding together the superhero community.

 

Hoping for the best and planning for the worst, the founders of Martin’s School took great pains to ensure that the form and location of their campus was perfect. They reviewed city after city after city until they found their ideal in Joyous Harbor, Rhode Island. Property values were low in the sparsely populated town and tolerance for superhumans high. Joyous Harbor didn’t have its famous superhuman museums in the 40’s, but it was still known as “superhero city” from being the headquarters of the Fishermen and birthplace of the Red Cardinals. With two superhero legacies and a sparse population, Joyous Harbor was easily the best choice for Martin’s School. 

 

With the matter of where to build the school settled, the matter of how was then addressed. The choice of a gargantuan art nouveau tower as a campus may seem odd at first and even scandalous when one considers its designer Arthur Ezra, eccentric owner of AEon architecture who was once the superhero Candlelight, but there were reasons for its construction.

 

The school had to be titanically large. Martin’s School was prepared to accept superhuman students from all around the world, and with the interway not existing until the 50’s, this meant that everything Martin’s School needed to meet the demands of the world’s most diverse set of learners had to be on-site. This called for several kinds of living quarters, several kinds of medical facilities, and several kinds of research centers. It called for air-tight chambers, tanks of water, telepathic dampeners, gravity nullification chambers, and even prison facilities.

 

111 floors was not an excess. It was the result of compressing as many of the facilities as they dared.

 

Martin’s School being a lofty tower instead of a sprawling campus was for several reasons. The most commonly known was that property was taxed in Joyous Harbor by the plot, not airspace. Less known was that it cut down on disruptions to the surrounding community. With gymnasiums and testing facilities placed near the top, the city below didn’t have to worry about being deafened. Being a tower also helped Martin’s numerous flying classes. In fact, many flying schools around the world use Martin’s construction as a model.

 

Flight was a very common superpower, but also one that many found difficult to use. Fear of heights was common. Man was not made to feel nothing below his feet, and the sky can be an intimidating place. Having a large structure nearby with an easy-to-grip stone facade and large open windows provided psychological assurance. A furtive flyer just had to touch the building to feel safe.

 

Today, a great deal of Martin High’s floors are empty compared to the 40’s. The Interway has made it so that anyone can access the planet’s most state-of-the-art facilities just by going through a door. The form of mankind’s civilization has changed to that of a handful of cities surrounded by regenerating wilderness and small towns which can access the resources of the cities with a short trip through the Interway. Civilization has become more spacious and less crowded, and this change is reflected in Martin’s School.

 

Many empty floors have been converted into extra living space to deal with Martin’s yearly increases in student population. There is no pressing need for students to live on-campus with the Interway allowing them to return home after class no matter how far home is, but many older students see living on campus as an adventure and right-of-passage. It is a chance for them to get out from beneath their parents’ authority and test themselves, and Martin’s School wants to give them that opportunity for self discovery.

 

Other floors have been converted into galleries featuring exhibits on the school’s most famous and celebrated alumni in keeping with Joyous Harbor’s tradition of museums and collections. Still others have been converted into gardens and areas of contemplation such as a photite maze who’s walls shift as the sun outside goes from sunlight to sunset and modeled on one Arthur Ezra constructed for his private meditation.

 

Floors 100 through 111 have been remade into eleven CRS (controlled reality simulation) rooms connected and controlled by an AI named Thespian who personally portrays any sapients needed for the simulations. The CRS employ a variety of technologies and superpowered personnel to create near-perfect simulations be they of historic events, scientific concepts, or emergency situations. 

 

The public is free to visit these remodeled floors during school hours, even the CRS. Thespian likes to put on one-man plays when not called upon for lessons. The school believes that the public sharing the building with students fosters an atmosphere of community and warmth. The community and students come to know and trust each other. It is a strategy borrowed from Statesmen centers and works just as well in Martin’s as it does there.

 

Ever at the forefront of education, Martin’s School continues to experiment. It is tempting to think of mainstreaming as the ultimate in education, but the teachers at Martin’s know, like all good educators, that the best practices don’t stay the best forever. The current principal, Liam Plaras, is attempting to push a new kind of education he calls inclusion. In inclusion, students take part in the individualized curriculum of other students in the hopes of becoming more well-rounded individuals familiar with powers and abilities outside their own. Telepaths take flight classes where they learn to act as ground control communication for the flyers. Telekinetics take super-speedster classes where they learn how to connect the thoughts of basics and superhumans that think faster than light.

 

So far, inclusion has failed to win over the faculty, who find it difficult to implement and its efficacy questionable. But whatever form the future of education takes, Martin’s School will have a hand in shaping that form.

 

The Founding

 

Martin’s School is named after Dick Martin, aka Pyroman, one of the earliest superheroes of the 1930’s. Dick Martin was framed for a murder he didn’t commit and sentenced to die in the electric chair, but when electricity coursed through his body he was miraculously unharmed. What was more, he found that he could summon and control that same electricity as well as other forms of energy.

 

Dick Martin could have unleashed vengeance on the system that nearly killed him unjustly. Instead, he became a reformer, and is often credited with ending capital punishment in the United States. He became a superhero detective investigating claims of wrongful convictions around the country. The energy he manifested and manipulated, a sort of quasi-energy that sometimes behaved like fire and other times like electricity, he believed was a gift from God. He called this energy pyros and freely shared it with the world believing it was not his to profit from. Pyros continues to be used as a common energy source to this day. Optional charges for the use of pyros go to the Martin Foundation which funds conviction review units worldwide.

 

Shortly before the Worlds War, he married his lawyer Susan Bromfeld who helped him navigate the byzantine world of law during his investigations. They were unable to have children, but took on a recent proposal by educators for a superhuman school as a surrogate and placed the full support of the Martin Foundation behind it. 

 

Pyroman was a well-loved superhero, and his support of the proposal brought it a great deal of public support particularly when he gave his famous “Do we fight for the future?” speech at the Rhode Island Statesmen center in which he urged the swift construction of a school to save young superhumans from a recent bill that lowered the draft age from 18 to 15 so that the military could make use of their powers

 

Opening two years before the Worlds War ended, Pyroman would not live to see his child grow to maturity virtually perishing at the battle of Frankfurt when a Vril energy dragon rendered his body of infinite energy mindless and inert, but he would have been proud. To be closer to what she and Dick had created, Susan retired from law to become Martin’s School’s first principal. Under her leadership, Martin’s School became a model not just for superhuman education, but basic education as well. It’s combination of generalized and personalized instruction, known as mainstreaming, became the educational standard worldwide. 

 

Nowadays, Martin’s School has a legacy of excellence to live up to, but its staff promises to mirror the perseverance of the statue of Pyroman at the front of their school. For decades, the statue has glowed with a current of pyros day and night illuminating a message from Pyroman engraved at the base for the young superhumans of today and tomorrow–”We are blessed by divine powers and tempered by earthly trials.”

 

As it is in stone, so to is it in the hearts and minds of all those that walk Martin’s School’s halls.