Puberty is a hell of a time for any average teenager. Hormones rage; hair and pimples sprout up uninvited; your body begins changing in frightening and unsettling ways—all in all it’s a scary and confusing period. But in the Marvel Universe, puberty can be straight up deadly. When a mutant hits puberty, not only is it all of the random boners and wispy mustaches, but maybe your eyes turn into lasers or you turn into a human comet—unannounced and unexpected mind you—and you ruin everybody's prom by turning the gymnasium into a pile of smoldering rubble, you instantaneously become feared and hated by the world at large. If that does happen to you, you can be whisked away to a special school called Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters—a sprawling campus in upstate New York, staffed by grown up mutants who will teach you how to control your newly found, all organic murderface. But before you accept their offer letter, you may want to take a few things into consideration so you can realize how bad of an idea this truly is.

Your Teachers Are Basically Terrorists

What do you call a group of para-military people, holed up in a fortified location, stockpiling weapons? Well, if you’re the US Government you call them a threat to national security and you ATF the living hell out of their compound. In the Marvel Comics Universe, you call them the X-men and they’re the defenders of an entire race. While this might, initially, put them in a bad light, they do it with the best interests of their people in mind. Unfortunately for the naive youngsters Hogwarting their way into the ranks of the X-Men, this means that the staff have stationed themselves as the breakpoint against all known governments (and the ten-story-tall murder-bots designed to kill their kind) and the entire human race; and they’ve done it by stockpiling and training living weapons of mass destruction.

It’s not just the angry and spiteful population of the world the student’s have to worry about. The X-Men have also made enemies of alien races, cosmic destruction gods, sentient robots and everything in between. They’ve basically pissed off every angry bully in the Universe and then told them where they live. That’s not exactly something that they’re going to put on their welcome brochure. Also, if we could digress for just a moment and ask, what in the actual fuck is the dress code for faculty at this “school”? We’re pretty sure if the janitor or the lunch lady at our public high school came to work in a fetishized combatsex-chic outfit they would be fired. From a canon. Out of the district. Not allowed to teach vulnerable and persecuted children.

"Teacher Attire"

Your School Gets Blown Up. Like A Lot.

The idea of taking all of the mutants and putting them in a school where they can learn how to control their powers around a group of their peers who are afflicted with similar problems looks great on paper; until you realize that you’ve taken a large majority of defenseless, yet fiercely hated, children, grouped them all together and told the world where they are. You’ve painted a big bright target on Google maps that says, "Take out your genocidal hatred here.” And boy howdy have the bad guys RSVP’d to the doom party with gusto.

The school has been decimated by aliens from outerspace, genocidal religious zealots, former teachers with a star for a head and evil robots. Even if the school isn’t being outright destroyed, it’s often being threatened and attacked by everything from evil mutants, humans wanting to harvest the children’s organs, to the straight up fucking Devil. Basically, it’s like living inside one of Michael Bay’s fever dreams.

This could be their recruitment video

Teenage Squabbles With Super Weapons

Teenagers—normal, everyday, non-powered teenagers—are, at the heart of things, small human emotion bombs that are incapable of controlling their baser functions. Just ask any parent who has one or take a few minutes to remember just how awful you were when you were one. (Don’t lie to yoursef, you were horrible, ask your parents.) Teenagers are constantly on the razor’s edge of self-delusion and self-destruction. They will try to hump anything that moves and will come to blows at a moment's notice. Now imagine all of those pent up hormones, anger issues and rage boners housed inside one facility.

Damnit, even Mutants have hipsters...

You’re not always going to recruit the best and brightest to the Xavier Academy. Every high school has its reprobates and the X-Men school isn’t alone. Except instead of just smoking, doing drugs, and stealing their parent’s car, these teenagers are capable destroying city blocks, crashing the world’s computer networks with a thought and mentally manipulating the entire student population. The students at Xavier’ have started riots, hopped up on drugs for mutants, that have almost killed the headmaster. They’ve stolen the alien technology that runs the school, and the school’s supersonic fighter jet (what school has these things that children can access?) for funsies. They’ve even gone so far as to stow away on alien spaceships for adventures. LIKE NO BOARDING SCHOOL EVER.

The Teachers Can Read Your Mind And Lots Of Other Weird Shit

When you’re a teenager, you hate authority and can’t help but thinking about humping more often than a Kardashian thinks about selling out. You’re brimming with ideas that you would almost never say outloud (unless you’re an asshole) and impure compulsions that you would never act upon (unless you’re an asshole). Most of the time, these are harmless things that most teenagers go through. You hunker down in your bedroom, put on The Cure’s Disintegration album, fill notebook after notebook full of shitty poetry and seethe until it’s time for sketti and meatballs and evening sitcoms with the family.

"Nobody gets my poetry. The Pleebs."

But no thought is safe at this school. The headmaster is one of the strongest telepaths on the face of the earth. His first student is an Omega Level Mutant who—aside from being an insanely strong telekinetic and telepath—also happens to, on occasion, embody the celestial equivalent of the apocalypse. One teacher can walk right through solid objects like Casper the fucking Ghost. The head science teacher is one of earth’s leading bio geneticists who, as it happens in the Willy Wonka world of the X-Men, is covered head to toe in blue fur. God forbid you have a dirty thought (that teachers can read) and head to your room (thats door means just about fuck-all) for a moment of "privacy," only to have a bright blue teacher-demon burst through your door to explain that what you’re doing is completely natural and normal for your age and physiology. Good luck getting through puberty with that going on.

The School Has ZERO Accreditation!

The Xavier School For Gifted Youngsters has one purpose: to train the next generation of mutants to use their mutant powers to defend the mutant race as a member of the X-Men. But what if you don’t want to be conscripted into gene-based military service? What if you’re just a kid who grew wings and could fly but just wanted to grow up to be a web developer or stand-up comedian? What if, after all the years of formal schooling, you just want to take your laser eyes and go to Harvard or MIT and become an electrical engineer? Well, pudding-pop, I've got bad news for you. Among the classes in “team-based combat tactics” and “how to take down a Brood horde” or “History of Mutant on Mutant violence,” the one educational underpinning that you’re not going to receive is “all the shit that high school students learn to get into college.”

That’s right, this is a military institution and, like all military schools, the goal isn’t necessarily educational-based but building towards military conscription. Sure, they give you super nifty spandex-y outfits and teach how to harness the power of your all organic murderface for combat maneuvers, but they don’t exactly give you the primer on American Government and History or the basics of “This is how you pay your bills and don’t fuck up your credit score” (I think most regular high schools could benefit from that last one). Basically, this is a school for kids who desperately want to grow up and go to war with any, and every, thing that thinks they shouldn’t be here; and that’s not for everyone.

Ugly John has three faces. That's it. He's worthless in a fight.

Bottom line, parents with mutant children, while your progeny may be weird and in need of guidance, you could probably do better than Xavier’s. Just don’t send them to the Hellfire Club. That place is even worse and the name of the school looks horrible on a high school transcript.