Enum table entry

Have a question that im trying to figure out how to resolve. I have a field type in mysql that is of the enum type. Unless youre familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, you wont get what the values mean, but hopefully youll get the gist anyway. I have a column labelled school which holds an enum data type comprised of the values 1 through 40. From the website front end, where the data is being entered, i want to display, ideally a series of checkboxes, otherwise a list which would allow a user to select multiple items in that will translate into this enum field. For instance, a series of checkboxes with items such as abjuration, conjuration, divination, and others, which will all have a numeric value which gets plugged into the enum field. for instance, if a user selected abjuration, and divination, it would be plugged into sql as 1, 3 (or however enum data is input into its column). That being the case how do i utilize php to get this to work? what kind of form elements etc... The problem im seeing with checkboxes are that they are discreet and dont group together, so i cant get all the data to go into one column in mysql. Hopefully i havent horribly confused the issue and some kind soul out there can tell me how to send this data across. As a double nice thing...how would you write it to pull the data back out...ie, convert 1, 3 to show abjuration, divination? Thanks for the help in advance.