Random facts about MHA and Japanese high schools!
P.S. I will say things like extra curricular subjects, which isn't playing sports after school—that's club activities. This is referring to literal. Extra. Curricular. Like there's literally shit. Added. To your curriculum. Capiche?
The hero course and hero support course actually learn easier material compared to the general studies course!
What, how? You may ask. They're seen doing incredibly difficult things in class in the anime, no?
Well yes and no. Yes, they are canonically all extremely smart and solving difficult questions. But here's the thing: Japanese high school courses are overall split into 2 things. 普通科 or general/normal/standard course and 専門科 or extracurricular course.
And the hero course, by definition, will fall under the extracurricular course rather than the general studies course, because in the extracurricular course you learn very specific subjects/things that general courses don't, and these subjects will directly link to your future job. For example, my high school has a nursing course and a culinary course, and both of these courses have easier general studies (the main 5 subjects) in exchange for the extracurricular subjects they have to do as a part of picking that course. Nursing students have anatomy, etc., among many things (and I don't know what the culinary course does but they cook n' shit).
And UA's hero course, or any hero course, will also fall under this extracurricular course category, as they have special course-exclusive subjects such as, well... heroics. A big part of their curriculum is taken up by learning heroics, the same way as my school's nursing students spend a lot of their week learning medical things (I'm a first grader, so they're currently learning all bone names, etc., and how to vaccinate people and getting vaccines themselves). And same as UA's support course, UA's support course shows that the students there spend a lot of their time learning to build, code, and engineer robot parts to help support heroes in battle, thus adding an extracurricular subject to their curriculum. (By heroics I mean them literally fighting each other.)
In exchange, both the hero course and hero support course will have less material and difficult things to learn for the main subjects (Japanese, science, English, social studies, and math).
Whereas the general studies course is exactly as it says. It's a course to study the general subjects (same subjects listed above), but that is all you learn. And you learn this for things like the university/college entrance exams (yes, those also have entrance exams, kill me). And because they have no course-exclusive subjects, all time and effort goes into those main 5 subjects and will rise extremely quickly in difficulty as time goes on and objectively learn more than the hero course/support course. People in the general studies course (like meeeeee) choose this course typically for 1 reason: to get a recommendation into a university you want to attend. What do recommendations do? Well, similar to high school recommendations, they lessen the subjects you have to take during the test. And unlike high school, they will typically not offer "sports" as a subject unless it's a school that specialises in that (also a thing), but because almost everyone is applying for these, it makes them 100x more competitive and difficult than the high school entrance exams, and the bar is extremely high. Thus, you need to learn the most difficult and extra things because the course is, well... a studying course, whereas an extracurricular course will focus on the special exclusive subjects (depending on the school and course, these can range from easy to I wanna die).
And this is why the hero course is probably learning easier/less things than the general studies course. It doesn't mean that they're dumber or have it any easier, it just means their workload is lessened compared to a course whose sole focus is, well, studying. (This isn't confirmed canon, but tbh, just a quick little check online and I'm pretty confident that it probably is.)
So basically uas hero course is just a more dangerous version of sports courses.
If you're a bit confused on what I mean by high school entrance exams, reference this post and maybe check out this one or this one, which was a rough explanation of what I did for my entrance exams.
Hope this made sense!
Bonus fun fact! A lot of textbooks (literature to my knowledge) are made more for these extracurricular courses!
