Hola,
I'm in the process of reviewing the chapters from my "History of Vintage" series, and some issues have arisen (or more precisely, have always been present, but never fully resolved), that I thought I'd present to you to weigh in on.
First of all, if you aren't familiar with the concept, here you go:
http://classicdojo.org/school/schooldex.html
The most important link is the April '96 link (the 7th link down), which is the version 5.4 of Robert Hahn's Schools of Magic. In it, he identifies 6 Schools: Weissman, Kim, Handelman, Chang, O'Brien, and Maysonet.
If you've followed my History of Vintage series then you know that I borrow a great deal from his attempt to delineate different strategic concepts as a trope for the history of Vintage. With the benefit of hindsight, we see that some of the "schools" he identified as such are less schools than broadly used fundamental principles. Thus, of his original "6" (or 4 depending on which version of his SoM you are reading), I argue that only two are really "schools" as such: The Weissman and O'Brien Schools.
Now here's where things get interesting. I argue, throughout the series, that there are 6 Schools of Type I/Vintage Magic, in the sense that Hahn defined them (I'm not going to get into a debate over his definition - just read it for yourself): 1) Weissman, 2) O'Brien, but also: 3) The Reanimator School, best represented by Dredge today, 4) A Combo School (represented by decks like DPS today, but used to show up as Prosperity Vice, the first Doomsday deck, Recursion Twister, etc.), 5) a Turbo Xerox /Comer School (represented by decks Jeskai Mentor or Delver before Gush was restricted again), and 6) the Lestree School (which was represented by Bertrand Lestree's proto Zoo deck, and later by the mid-1990s Zoo decks, Monkey, May I, etc.
These Schools do not encompass the entirety of Type I or Vintage. His metaphor or analogy breaks down, as you can see, with the onset of Necro summer (if you look at the original link above). I don't think he fully realized why at the time (although I have). The main reason is that the Schools Analogy doesn't really work with you have a singular, unique and idiosyncratic card that does really powerful thinks. Thus, cards like Necro - cards that can power up a variety of strategies, but produce unique functions in Magic, can't generate schools in the same way that the other Schools can.
Thus, there are always strategies that lay outside of these schools, because they are singular/idiosyncratic, like Painter Combo, etc. I don't want to debate this point, either.
The question I want to pose is this: Do you feel it is important that each school, following the convention of Robert Hahn, be associated with a "name" of a player, like "Weissman," "O'Brien", etc.? Or, would you rather have the name follow the strategic classifications more familiar to the format? Like "Reanimator", etc.
I ask because it is difficult to identify the 'founder' of, for example, the Reanimator School. Mark Chalice created the first Reanimator deck on record, but Alan Comer created the first modern version of it, structured around 4 Bazaar, 4 tutors to find etc, etc. But Alan Comer also created the Turbo Xerox concept. So, the School could be called the "Comer School" or the "Turbo Xerox" School or something else entirely.
It is especially difficult to peg the "Combo" School to a particular name. There isn't really a single person who really focused their energies on this school for a long period of time during the formative years of the game. Maybe Chapin to some degree. But he played many decks.
Let me know your thoughts.