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== Anime and Manga ==
 
* Variant: In ''[[Death Note (Manga)|Death Note]]'', Wammy's Orphanage for genius children really exists in order to find a successor to L.
** ''[[Monster (Animemanga)|Monster]]'' does the opposite: the Kinderheim 511 orphanage {{spoiler|really exists in order to create a heartless monster to become the next Hitler. They're almost all killed when they find a kid who is exactly what they want and he leaves pretty much everyone dead.}}
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! GX]]''. Duel Academia is basically a giant roach motel for [[Cosmic Horror|Cosmic Horrors]], training kids to fight said horrors in the process.
* Mugen Gakuen (Infinity College) in ''[[Sailor Moon]] S'' acts as a front for activities of the Death Busters, aliens from Tau Ceti who possess human bodies and seek to summon Master Pharaoh 90 to end the world.
* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' reveals us during the later parts of the series that ''every single person'' in Shinji's class is a pilot candidate. It does make sense to collect all of them into one school as said school is located in the same city which the [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]] are attacking and which houses the [[Humongous Mecha]] to fight said aliens. It even makes more sense when it's revealed that the Marduk Institute that selects pilots is a front for NERV itself who can quickly forge the necessary papers, thereby calling up new pilots on their discretion. Just watch episode 18: Unit 03 is completed and is about to be shipped to Japan. Cue NERV approaching {{spoiler|Touji}}, using his {{spoiler|sister being transferred to a better hospital}} as leverage.
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== Fanfic ==
 
* In Red Witch's ''[[Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers (Animation)|Galaxy Rangers]]'' fanfic, Miss Abercrombie's "Charm School" turns out to be an elite academy for spies and secret agents from Earth's wealthiest and well-placed families.
 
== Film ==
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* Hampden College, the setting of ''[[The Secret History]]'', isn't specifically ''for'' scheming--but there's enough of it going around all the same. Richard calls his classics lessons "Julian's private university," which certainly fits this trope.
* The ''[[Gemma Doyle]]'' trilogy.
* In ''[[Animorphs (Literature)|Animorphs]]'', the Yeerks, mind-controlling aliens that inhabit their hosts, use a Boys & Girls Club type organization named ''The Sharing'' to recruit. The Vice-Principal of the protagonists' school is infested, and the janitor's closet is an entryway to the aliens' feeding grounds.
* In the ''[[Alex Rider (Literature)|Alex Rider]]'' series, Alex attends a corrective school for delinquent rich kids. All is normal until the "changed" students turn out to be genocidal clones of the [[Big Bad]] about to use their parent's resources for a new apartheid.
* ''[[HIVE Series|H.I.V.E: the Higher Institute for Villainous Education]]'', is a more obvious one: the kids are told from the start that the aim is to produce Villains.
* ''[[The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie]]'', where a gang of pupils are secretly coached by Miss Brodie for her own purposes.
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* In [[Lois Duncan]]'s ''[[Down a Dark Hall]]'', the exclusive school Blackwood (it's really ''really'' exclusive, it only has four students counting the main character) is really for the purpose of {{spoiler|collecting kids with ESP so dead writers, artists, composers, scientists, and mathematicians can use them as vehicles to produce all the things they didn't get to when they were alive. This would be all fine and dandy--in fact, Ruth, the most intelligent of the girls, doesn't mind being used to write down mathematical theories--except that not only can people like Emily Bronte and Vermeer get through, but so can anyone else. Sandy ends up transcribing a terribly vulgar poem in French, and let's not even get into what Lynda paints. Also, Blackwood is not the first school Madame Duret opened; there was one in France and one in England. Of all the students at those schools, ''four killed themselves and the rest are mental hospitals''. And Madame Durect ''keeps trying anyway''.}}
* In ''The Grounding of Group 6'' by Julian F. Thompson, five kids are sent to what appears to be an exclusive boarding school but is really a cover to have them taken into the woods with a hitman [[Offing the Offspring|hired by the kids' parents]] to kill them all.
* The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened in [[The Mysterious Benedict Society]], which due to some [[Fun Withwith Acronyms]] and [[Sdrawkcab Name]] becomes E.V.I.L. The main base of Mr. Curtain (in the first book, anyway) and therefore of all his schemes.
 
== Live Action TV ==
 
* The new series of ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]'' plays with this trope. In the episode "School Reunion", the school is secretly run by Krillitanes, who use the children to crack the "Skasis Paradigm", which gives total control of time and space. In "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky", Luke Rattigan runs a school for gifted teens, planning to repopulate a new world with geniuses after a Sontaran takeover of Earth.
* ''[[The Sarah Jane Adventures]]'': "Revenge of the Slitheen" has a plethora of schools worldwide being used, via new technology blocks, by the Slitheen in a revenge plot against humankind. They are attempting to use the technology in secret rooms hidden in each of these new buildings to switch off the sun.
* ''[[Are You Afraid of the Dark?]]'' had an episode where two kids discover that their boarding school is run by monsters, who brainwash the students into taking care of alien eggs.
* An episode of the new ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' involved a school where children of wealthy parents are brainwashed and controlled to create political weapons.
* The Academy that River was sent to in ''[[Firefly]]'', supposedly a school for the exceptionally gifted, but in reality a twisted government/corporate facility where she and others like her were subjected to [[Mind Rape|horrific experiments and brainwashing]] in order to [[Super Soldier|turn them into weapons]].
* In ''[[Kamen Rider Fourze]]'', Amanogawa High was ostensibly set up to encourage creativity in bright students and lead them towards an interest in space exploration. It's really a front for {{spoiler|unleashing the power of the Horoscopes and using the kids for experiments with Switches.}}
* In ''[[MIM.I. High]]'', secret agency M.I.9 maintains a secret base under St. Hope's and employs three students as its top agents.
 
 
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== Video Games ==
 
* In ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War (Video Game)|Deus Ex Invisible War]]'', the Tarsus Academies where the player character begins are an arguably more benevolent example, but with a twist: training corporate spies and assassins is their ''cover story'', but they are later revealed to be a front for a corporation called ApostleCorp to develop [[Nanomachines|biomodification technology]] that will allow them to revive their leaders from stasis and bring about their [[Utopia Justifies the Means|utopian vision]] of a "Perfect Democracy". You can choose to side with them in one of the [[Multiple Endings]].
* In ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R. 2 Project Origin]]'', Wade Elementary is actually a cover to test drugs on the children in order to increase their psychic potential.
* ''[[Disgaea]]'' 3 is pretty much this.
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== Web Comics ==
 
* The psychic academy in the webcomic ''[[Zap (Webcomic)|Zap]]''
* While the titular [[Gunnerkrigg Court (Webcomic)|Gunnerkrigg Court]] is still simply a morally ambiguous [[Extranormal Institute]], as more is revealed about {{spoiler|Jeanne and the founders}} it seems to be going in this direction.
 
== Western Animation ==
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** He was trying to abolish summer break.
* In the ''[[American Dragon Jake Long]]'' episode "A Befuddled Mind", [[Evil Sorcerer|Eli Pandarus]] fronted an academy for gifted children in the hopes that one of them could solve a magical puzzle box containing powerful magic.
* The episode of ''[[Teen Titans (Animationanimation)|Teen Titans]]'' that introduced Brother Blood to the series had Cyborg going undercover at the HIVE Academy (no relation to the one in the Literature section) as a villain-in-training named Stone. It's really not all that different from a regular high school (there's a Sadie Hawkins dance, regular lunchroom, etc). The only thing different is the subject matter. The HIVE and Brother Blood exist in comics, but the Church of Blood and the HIVE are totally separate organizations, and neither spent a great deal of time grooming new supervillains in a full on "[[X -Men|Xavier School]], but evil!" setting. By the way, HIVE stands for [[Fun Withwith Acronyms|Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination]].
 
{{reflist}}
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