There were towns with fairly universal schooling in medieval Europe. One world-building decision should be whether the society has cheap-to-write-on quick writing materials such as paper, or just slow-to-write-on, expensive ones such as parchment. Another would be local attitudes to writing: is it seen as a special skill or something every teenager has to learn to memorize enough love songs to woo their special someone like one society in South-East Asia?
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Originally Posted by hal
GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition and earlier however, had to go a different route. One way to test would be to use the AURA spell - which a person casting the spell can also get a pretty good idea of what level of magery the target of the spell has. The only alternative is to try the DUNE Bene Gesserit style of testing by placing a number of small items in a box with only ONE item being a magic item. Thus, each item is grasped in the dark, and the potential mageborn has to pick it out of the non-magical items. Perhaps the best way might be to have identical shaped and sized items (such as marbles?) and have the only difference be in color, which people can't tell without their eyes - from a box.
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GURPS Banestorm (just to use as an example) suggests Aura, Divination, the "identify a magic item amongst baubles" test, and various quack methods. If we assume that the average mage has IQ + Magery around 11, an advantage of these methods is that they don't require learning a specific spell just to identify mages.