World's Most Famous Schools: The Good, The Bad, The Fictional

No matter if you ask Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, most people can agree on one thing: Education is important. For many, earning a degree is essential to earning enough money to live or finding a career that doesn't make you want to gauge your eyes out.

In the spirit of celebrating education, here's a list of the most famous schools in the world:

The Good

When it comes to universities, Cambridge and Oxford take the cake. For one, they’re two of the oldest universities in the world — Oxford was founded in 1096, and Cambridge in 1209 — but they’re also the places where some of the world’s greatest discoveries were made.

Mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton studied at Trinity College in Cambridge in the 17th century, for instance, and James Watson and Francis Crick famously discovered the structure of DNA at Cambridge in 1953. Authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the "Chronicles of Narnia" and the "Lord of the Rings," respectively, were part of a literary crew in Oxford in the early 20th century.

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The U.S. has its Ivy Leagues: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton and Pennsylvania. Harvard University is certainly the oldest (it was established in 1636), and arguably the most famous.

Some of the greatest minds and most successful Americans attended Harvard, including several former presidents (Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, to name a few), writers who found their way into the literary canon (Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Updike, T.S. Eliot) and even a couple of dropouts who made it big in the tech industry (Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates).

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The High Schools

The American high school is the hallmark setting of teen TV shows and coming-of-age novels. And although many of them are fictional, a few of them really exist.

Take, for example, the 2000 film “Remember the Titans.” It told the story of an African-American football coach who tried to integrate a Virginia high school's team in 1971 — and not only is the story of the "Titans" true, but T.C. Williams High School is real too.

Another football movie, 2004’s “Friday Night Lights” was also based on the true story of a Texas football team that made a run at the state championship in 1988. That school, Permian High School, exists and is still in session.

The Bad

Some schools have received more notoriety than fame. Former students at St. George’s School, a boarding school in Rhode Island, spoke last year about being sexually abused in the 1970s and 1980s. A report that documented the findings stated, “Many of these students remember St. George’s as a place where their abusers created a kind of private hell for them — a place where they suffered trauma and emotional wounds that, for many, remain unhealed.”

St. George’s didn’t always have that reputation. In 1920, it appeared in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel “This Side of Paradise,” in which Fitzgerald described the school as “prosperous and well-dressed.”

The Fictional

Last but not least, perhaps the most famous school of all doesn’t really exist: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This school, created by J.K. Rowling when she wrote the "Harry Potter" series, had it all: Magic classes, fantastic creatures, staircases that moved, paintings that spoke to you and even talking hat that told you in which house you belonged. No doubt, many children have hours daydreaming about Hogwarts and praying that they’d receive a Hogwarts acceptance letter by owl delivery before their 11th birthday.

For those who have a hard time accepting that Hogwarts is fictional, it might be wise to remember a quote from Headmaster Albus Dumbledore: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”